Toronto Heritage Italian (r): Maintaining homeland patterns
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contrary to experimental research, comparative variationist approaches find for heritage speakers many cases of maintenance of the homeland grammar. We analyze patterns of rhotic production in spontaneous speech of the heritage Calabrese Italian community of Toronto, Canada, and its homeland counterpart in Calabria, Italy. 1,555 tokens of word-internal, singleton /r/ were collected from the HLVC corpus and analyzed using mixed-effects models. Results show an ongoing pattern of lenition for both homeland and heritage speakers. Heritage speakers further develop this language internal trend, indicating grammar boosting. Homeland social constraints are maintained by heritage speakers. We find no evidence of transfer from English or simplification in the heritage language. Similar patterns of rhotic lenition are found in heritage Tagalog (Umbal & Nagy 2021) and Russian (Nagy 2024), though with different social constraints. Cross-linguistic comparison proves that variation in heritage languages is not necessarily caused by contact, and that change needn’t be related to indexicality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".