What’s in a ne? Variable ne Deletion in the Spoken French of Two Canadian Politicians: François Legault and Justin Trudeau
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What’s in a ne? Variable ne Deletion in the Spoken French of Two Canadian Politicians: François Legault and Justin Trudeau Megan Magisano The French language in Quebec is deeply rooted in the province’s francophone culture and identity (Oakes, 2004); consequently, some of its spoken features diverge from varieties spoken in Europe. One of these features is the variable deletion of the negation particle ne (Poplack & St-Amand, 2007; e.g., “je ne parle pas”), which can be variably produced depending on a number of linguistic and social factors. This study investigated whether Quebec French speakers employ variable ne deletion in their speech and the phenomenon’s relationship to sociostylistic contexts (i.e., formal vs. informal styles), hypothesizing that this variable deletion may be connected to expressions of Quebec identity. To test this hypothesis, a variationist analysis was conducted to compare ne deletion in the speech of two prominent political figures in Canada: Justin Trudeau and François Legault. They were selected based on their respective French-Canadian backgrounds and prominence in Canada and Quebec. The corpus used for this analysis was collected and transcribed from a selection of each politician’s political addresses regarding Covid-19. The researchers hypothesized that Legault would be more likely to delete ne than Trudeau, and that Legault would be more likely to delete ne in less formal settings. Following a variationist perspective for examining variable phenomena, an inter-speaker analysis compared ne deletion between speakers (Legault and Trudeau), while an intra-speaker analysis compared ne deletion between sociostylistic contexts (i.e., formal public addresses and informal question-and-answer periods). iii Statistical results (Goldvarb Z; Sankoff et al., 2018) revealed that Legault was significantly more likely to delete ne than Trudeau. Additionally, Legault showed no significant difference in the likelihood of ne deletion in the adopted sociostylistic contexts. The patterns observed in Legault’s speech reflect the variationist literature on Quebec French, in that French- Canadians almost categorically favour ne deletion (Poplack & St-Amand, 2007). One possible explanation for these results is that Legault’s frequent use of ne deletion solidifies his link to the Quebec identity, whereas Trudeau’s patterns deviate from the Quebec French norm, perhaps to reinforce his role as a Canadian leader, thus appealing to Canada’s francophone population on a more national level.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".