Placing the ‘‘Needs Washed’’ Construction in a Broader Settler Colonial Context
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ‘‘needs washed’’ construction (e.g., ‘‘The car needs washed’’) is well attested as a minority morphosyntactic feature in British and American English varieties. It is believed to have arrived in the US due to Scots-Irish migration from the UK during the colonial period. However, the feature is largely unattested in other settler colonial varieties, despite Scots-Irish and Scottish people participating in early settlement. This poses a problem for the account of the feature in the US: why is it in the US, but not, say, Canada? This paper uses a grammatical acceptability survey to posit a resolution to the problem. I show that the "needs washed" construction is accepted by a sizable minority of Australians, Canadians, and New Zealanders, that acceptance corresponds with historical settlement patterns in Canada and New Zealand, and that constraints on acceptability in these three states mirror those in the US and UK. This suggests that the construction is present in all settler colonial varieties, supporting its proposed origin in the US. The findings suggest a pan-colonial scale of homogeneity in settler colonial varieties in which they share a set of minority features as a result of sharing similar groups of founding settlers.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".