Figurative Language in Michif
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present study is a qualitative analysis of figurative language in Michif. Michif is an endangered and understudied Indigenous language of the Métis/Michif people, now found mainly in the Canadian prairie provinces and the state of North Dakota. It is a contact language two primary source languages: Plains Cree and Michif French. Much of the research on Michif continues to increase, much of it focuses on the areas of phonology, syntax, and morphology, leaving a knowledge gap regarding semantics and pragmatics. The purpose of this study is to address that knowledge gap by providing an overview of figurative language in Michif, including conceptual metaphors, similes, and metonymical expressions. The major research question is: What kind of figurative (i.e., non-literal) expressions exist in Michif, and how are they formulated? The results of the study are divided into broad categories such as animal similes, conceptual metaphors based on body-internal and body-external experiences, and expressions whose figurativeness relies on manipulating the grammatical animacy of nouns or verbs. A secondary aim of the study is to identify whether certain expressions may have been inherited from Plains Cree or Michif French, or whether they may be novel Michif expressions; while a great deal of figurative language in Michif appears to have been influenced by its ancestral languages, there exist both lexical and semantic differences between Michif and its sources languages with respect to certain figurative expressions. This study provides a starting point for future research into semantics in Michif.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".