Linguistic Consequences of Language Contact and Restriction: The Case of French in Ontario, Canada, by Raymond Mougeon & Edouard Beniak
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mougeon and Beniak present a valuable compilation of years of research performed on the Franco-Ontarian adolescent speech community.The numerous works of Mougeon, Beniak, et al. are already well known after more than a decade of sociolinguistic research conducted in Ontario.This book represents a synthesis of the major findings of this important long-term sociolinguistic study.The linguistic consequences alluded to in the title refer in particular to language change.Thus, the study entails an extensive linguistic investigation into the specific nature of language change as illustrated in the speech of francophone adolescents who live in a predominantly anglophone province.The context of the linguistic change, therefore, is a minority language environment as it takes place in a contact situation.Adolescents were chosen as informants since the younger generation displayed wide variation in levels of bilingualism and restriction.The main thrust of the discussion is the interplay of French and English regarding lexical borrowing, morphological simplification and stylistic reduction.From this in-depth grammatical analysis, the authors attempt to distinguish internally versus externally motivated change, an important contribution to the field.According to their study the prime determinants of change are imperfect mastery and restricted use.Mougeon and Beniak then compare their findings with cross-dialectal research on other varieties of French spoken within and outside of North America.In general, the authors state in the Introduction that they hope that their book ' ...can be seen as [constituting] a response to [a] call for systematic research on the linguistic attributes of language attrition which involve the dual phenomenon of bilingualism and language-use restriction' (p.4).Following the Introduction, Chapters 2, 3 and 4 provide the necessary context for the ensuing linguistic analyses found in the latter part of the book.These initial chapters cover important sociohistorical and sociolinguistic information on the community, this vital data lending depth to the study.The interplay of English and French is linguistically interesting in this speech community where French often does not rank high on prestige, usefulness, and visibility.Chapters 5-11 form the core of the linguistic analyses.These sections explore various types of overt and covert interfe-
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".