Lexical obsolescence of French loanwords in Canadian English
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to present a refined classification of Canadianisms of French origin that have fallen out of use but have not been identified as obsolete in the second edition of the “Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles”, taking into account the causes of their obsolescence, as well as their frequency and association with a particular semantic field. The article examines 169 Gallicisms extracted from the dictionary, with their subsequent distribution into frequency categories (based on their use in the three Canadian media outlets – “The Globe and Mail”, “Montreal Gazette”, “CBC”) and 14 semantic fields. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that it presents, for the first time, a subject-related classification based on the frequency of occurrence for obsolete borrowed Canadianisms and a detailed discussion of the underlying causes of their obsolescence. The results of the study show that the lexical obsolescence of these loanwords is mainly due to extralinguistic factors. Many of the French-derived Canadianisms refer to still-existing realities of Canada, such as wildlife or geographical features. They therefore do not qualify for the most common classification as either archaic (they have no single-word equivalent) or historical (they express realities that still exist today). Since these obsolete words highlight a conceptual change in perception due to the loss of relevance of certain ways of life, they can be categorised as notiolisms.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.004 | 0.047 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it