Bibliographic record
Abstract
While phonetically-motivated change from below is a fundamental concept in contemporary approaches to phonology and variation, empirical data is sparse (Cedergren, 1973; Trudgill, 1974; Labov 2001), partly because changes usually go unnoticed until long after their inception, and because articulatory data (which can shed light on phonetic motivations) is often unavailable. This paper documents the inception of a change from below using corpus data and ultrasound imaging of the tongue. The variable under investigation is the rhoticity with which some speakers of Canadian French produce the vowels /ø/, /œ/ and /œ̃/, making them sound like English [ɹ] (i.e., heureux, docteur, and commun sound like [ɹ̩ʀɹ̩], [dɔktʌɹʀ] and [kɔmɹ̩̃]. When asked, native speakers are completely unaware of the difference between rhotic and non-rhotic pronunciations, suggesting that rhoticity is a change from below. Previous reports of retroflex-sounding variants of Canadian French vowels date back to the early 1970s in Montreal (Dumas 1972, 100, Sankoff, p.c.) and a retroflex-sounding variant of /ö/ has also been observed (Sankoff and Blondeau, 2007), but there has been no previous articulatory study of these sounds. North American English /ô/ can be produced with various tongue shapes, including bouched and retroflex variants (Delattre and Freeman, 1968) raising the question of whether French rhotic vowels are also produced with these categorically different tongue shapes.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.032 | 0.029 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".