<i>Buddies</i> , <i>Dudes</i> , and <i>Bros</i> of Ontario: Trends and Patterns of Vocative Change
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study tracks the use of familiarizer vocatives across the twentieth century in Ontario, Canada from a corpus comprising 11 million words of conversational interviews from individuals in eighteen communities, born between the 1880s and the 2000s. Vocatives are a richly variable grammatical category which are strongly tied to their sociolinguistic context. We focus here on the sub-category of familiarizers for birth years 1950-2004, which in these materials are almost entirely dominated by man , buddy , and dude . We extracted and coded several thousand vocative tokens, yielding 467 familiarizers. Random Forest modeling shows significant effects of birth year, gender, and community; but not education nor occupation. The dominant familiarizer man declines with the rise of buddy (outside Toronto) and dude (especially inside Toronto). Women use these incoming forms more than men do, perhaps as alternatives to the masculine-associated form man . The results show rapid change for familiarizers in patterns which parallel longstanding sociolinguistic principles.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.021 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| 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 it