Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Linguistics — the study of language itself — morphology, lexicalism, word segmentation, syntax and semantics as linguists pose them, not as models encode them.
17 of 191 CASE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| CASE-010 | Henley’s rendering of Villon, “Booze and the blowens cop the lot” | W. E. Henley’s rendering of a Villon ballade into nineteenth-century English thieves’ slang, refrain “Booze and the blowens cop the lot” (U3). Already a radical translation, and deliberately opaque. The source of the manuscript’s refrain family (§1, §10). | Active |
| CASE-011 | Hofstadter’s mother’s translation | A rendering of Marot that broke most of the formal constraints and that Hofstadter came to judge perhaps the best. Refutes fidelity as a count of preserved constraints (A4). Absent from the manuscript. | Active |
| CASE-012 | The modernized refrains of Henley’s Villon | Invented modern refrains for Henley’s ballade (A6–A9), each a different speaker: “You blow it all on sex and booze”, “By Monday morning, you’re broke again”, “The party always gets its cut”, “The high life eats your paycheck”. Two survive as the manuscript’s opening example (§1). | Active |
| CASE-018 | ”You blow it all on sex and booze”, said by a friend, a parent, a judge, a comedian | The same sentence attributed to different speakers (A12, A18, A24): one teases, another reproaches, another condemns, another entertains. Words held fixed, act changed. Survives as the joke/reprimand contrast (§2) and the social-alignment manipulation of Case III (§10). | Active |
| CASE-019 | ”Hug from Doug” | A rendering of Marot that puts the translator’s name in the slot where Marot put his own. Wrong as a historical translation, right as a relation. The exchange’s first statement of relational invariance (A4). | Active |
| CASE-022 | A rendering that keeps the solidarity–criticism ambiguity open, and one that settles it | A34 §4 and A48 §7.5: two renderings with similar static profiles, one of which stays sensitive to a later affiliative framing because it sustains the ambiguity, while the other has already fixed the speaker as condemning. The concrete mechanism behind dynamical fidelity; dropped at outline v4. | Active |
| CASE-026 | Modern slang that makes the insider sound like an outsider imitating the subculture | A35 §7: replacing Henley’s argot with contemporary slang may keep the poem intelligible while making the speaker sound like an outsider, so the audience understands the observation and loses the complicity. Interpretive fidelity kept, performative fidelity lost. | Active |
| CASE-027 | Henley translated perfectly in the voice of an academic sociologist | A12’s thought experiment: every term rendered exactly, every proposition kept, but the speaker made to sound like an academic sociologist. Something fundamental has changed, so keeping the proposition is not sufficient. | Active |
| CASE-030 | E2: assistant-authored reconstruction chains with content-word overlap (C4) | Run at U24 (“do it”): three four-generation chains written by the assistant from a modernized Villon seed, scored by content-word Jaccard against the seed. The texts are authored with their intended trajectories; the numbers are exact properties of those texts. | Active |
| CASE-031 | Marot’s “A une Damoyselle malade” and Hofstadter’s translations of it | A sixteenth-century get-well poem whose content is trivial and whose form is everything, translated dozens of ways by Hofstadter and others. The exchange’s founding case, and the manuscript’s opening one (§1). | Active |
| CASE-032 | E4: within-session chains, stable complicit against a shift to moral instruction | Run after the owner’s U26 (“lol you ARE a text generation action. just delegate subtasks”): two three-generation chains written by the assistant in the same context. “The measured lexical similarities are near zero for both final texts”; one keeps complicity, the other becomes advice. | Active |
| CASE-058 | FactBank’s source-relative factuality labels and Kiesling et al.’s stance-triangle annotation: one stance construct annotated reliably, the interpersonal ones not | FactBank labels one event’s factuality separately for each source that reports it, so a proposition held fixed gets different commitment labels by source, and trained annotators agree at κ = 0.82. Kiesling et al. annotate Du Bois’s stance triangle in Reddit threads, including an investment dimension defined as the split of animator from principal, and reach only α = 0.40 to 0.57, with investment and alignment below 0.4 outside one community. Together they bracket an answer to QUESTION-076: commitment relative to a source is annotatable when defined by tests, interpersonal stance only moderately. | Active |
| CASE-059 | Tatiana’s letter in Eugene Onegin III: вы to ты and back, lost in Kline and half kept in Spalding | Tatiana’s letter to Onegin opens with the formal вы, breaks into the intimate ты at “я твоя”, and returns to вы in its last lines; only the pronouns mark the moves. Kline (2009) has “you” throughout, so neither move is in the English; Spalding (1881) switches to “thou” and never returns. A documented candidate for the half of a change of cover in which the source decides a relational question that a rendering makes undecidable. The texts are attested and the loss is visible; native attestation is thin and there is no evidence on English readers. | Active |
| CASE-066 | Dolly’s slip into ты in Anna Karenina I.4, and three English translations that carry it three ways | In Anna Karenina I.4 Dolly says one sentence to Stiva with ты amid вы, and the narrator says so. English has no live T/V pronoun. Dole (1886) keeps the Russian word and glosses it; Garnett (1901) adds “Stiva”; the Maudes (1918) add “our children”. The later two add words not in the Russian to carry the relation. Tolstoy himself says вы and its dictionary equivalent vous differ in coldness. A documented instance of the compensation mechanism; the evidence on what readers recover is translators’ and the author’s, not readers’. | Active |
| CASE-069 v2 | Labov’s recorded sounding sessions: ritual insult turning personal, with the same exchange shape and a different act | Labov’s team taped sounding among Harlem peer groups. Boot answers David’s taunt with a remark “related to A-5 in exactly the way that one sound is related to another”, yet both are taken as personal insults: denied, objected to, wept over. Labov’s rule puts the difference in a further relation, the shared knowledge before an audience that the proposition is untrue. A documented, non-institutional case for CLAIM-151 in which the act follows a relation among the parties, and for CLAIM-138, since the exchange relations alone match and the acts still differ. | Active |
| CASE-072 | Hafez’s “Shirazi Turk” in English: one ungendered beloved rendered as a maid, as God and as a boy | The opening of Hafez’s ghazal 3 names a beloved, “that Shirazi Turk”, whose sex and nature the Persian leaves open. English forces a choice at the first possessive. Jones (1771) and Bell (1897) make the beloved a maid, Clarke (1891) makes it God, and Davis (2012) makes it a boy, and Davis says in print that his choice is arbitrary. A documented instance of the half of a change of cover in which the rendering decides what the source left open. The disagreement on the source is among translators and scholars; no reader agreement has been measured. | Active |
| CASE-073 | The Kia Provo: one concept-car name, a blank coinage to the motor press and taken as honouring the IRA in Northern Ireland | In March 2013 Kia showed a concept car at Geneva named the Provo, “from the word ‘provoke’”. The motor press found no meaning in the name; in Northern Ireland, where “Provo” names a member of the Provisional IRA, six MPs said it “has caused deep offence”. Kia said it meant no offence, and withdrew the name for the UK and Ireland. One name, the speaker’s intention fixed and declared, a new audience, and an unintended reading taken up and acted on: the accidental, verbal variant of CASE-064, illustrating CLAIM-224. | Active |