Québécois French Futures in Real Time
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since at least the mid 19th century, the inflected future (IF) in affirmative clauses has steadily declined in Québécois French (Poplack & Dion 2009). Indeed, Wagner and Sankoff (2011) reported that in the Montreal French 1971 corpus (Sankoff & Cedergren 1972), decreasing age was correlated with decreasing use of affirmative IF. However, they also found that a panel of 59 speakers had significantly increased their use of IF between 1971 and 1984. They proposed that this be interpreted as a case of age grading rather than retrograde community change. The current paper reports on a trend study undertaken to test Wagner and Sankoff's proposal. 34 speakers recorded in 1971 were matched for social characteristics with 34 speakers recorded in 1984 (N=68 unique speakers). There was no significant difference (p < 0.5) in the rate of IF use between the two years (for affirmative uses only, 13.2% [N=112/847] in 1971 and 15.6% [N=194/1247] in 1984). Since this finding effectively rules out the "retrograde change" interpretation of the panel results, our trend study confirms Wagner & Sankoff's proposal.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.001 |
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".