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"We will be providing structural edits and adding new content to this page focused on SMALL CLAUSES. This is part of a course-based activity of a 3rd year syntax course, and we anticipate having completed our edits by the end of December. We would appreciate any and all constructive comments and suggestions about how to improve the overall quality of this article." Rachken Ammurr Rosabellec ( talk) 19:34, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
I know that the first example should be removed or replaced, as the verb "painted" selects not a clause but a direct and indirect object. I think that "the house blue" is no more a small clause than "the book to Mary" is in "I gave the book to Mary".
Additionally, I'm not so sure about "make" selecting for a clause either, since it seems to me that it, once again, has a direct and indirect object instead.
Urizen 10:28, 26 August 2007 (UTC)
How can we know that the French examples all involve a small clause? A couple of the examples have a relative clause that could perhaps be attached to the preceding noun. Consider, for instance, the following English sentences:
The relative clause who was smoking in (b) modifies the professor. How do we know that the same is not true in sentence (a)? In other words, how do we know that we are dealing with a small clause in (a)? -- Tjo3ya ( talk) 03:58, 28 March 2019 (UTC)
Thank you for your comment! I hadn't realized that (a) and (b) were relative clauses rather than small clauses, I'll fix that. Can you clarify what you mean about "a straightforward manner"? Laurasegriffin ( talk) 00:21, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
I'm planning to add the following content user:Laurasegriffin/sandbox to the Definition section to clarify small clause behaviour, add more structure, and introduce evidence for alternative perspectives regarding small clause behaviour. Any and all comments regarding accuracy & style are welcome! I intend to post this content on April 6, 2019 if there are no objections. Laurasegriffin ( talk) 23:03, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
The content from sandbox has been added! If anyone has any comments or concerns, please let me know here in the talk page, and I will make corrections ASAP. Laurasegriffin ( talk) 04:48, 7 April 2019 (UTC)
Hello, thank you for your comments! I have several comments.
1: please advise where you think redundancy occurs/rambling occurs, so I can correct it. I'm not sure specifically what you consider rambling.
There was discussion of the contradictory data in the structural analysis, but there were some contradictions in other data, e.g. pseudoclefting. I wasn't sure how the discussion in the structural analysis explained the pseudoclefting contradictions, so I created a separate section to discuss this. I haven't abandoned my section on the history of the small clause. Stay tuned for a draft in the next week or so!
2: Interlinear glosses will be added. Formatting for examples will also be fixed.
I had posted the examples in my sandbox sans glosses since I wasn't sure if Wikipedia articles required interlinear glosses or not. Some Wiki pages, such as Logophoricity, use interlinear glosses while others, such as French pronouns, don't. That being said, I'm learning from my mistake and I will rectify it!
3: For example (a), "that Mary entered" is not a small clause. I'm not sure this is a good example for proform substitution. There are multiple ways to communicate the same idea, but that doesn't mean the small clause analysis is necessarily wrong. If you have alternate sources that support your flat analysis, please include them so that way this article can represent different viewpoints.
I understand your point now, thank you!
4: I will move the constituency tests down to "Detecting Small Clauses" since having this information in two separate sections could be considered redundancy.
Yes, precisely.
5: Please consider revising content we add rather than deleting it. We wish to work with you to improve the small clause article and to have a collaborative approach involving you rather than having an edit war. As you know, we are doing this for a school project but we still wish to see the article improved from its current C rating to a higher rating. We would like to have you involved in this process as it is clearly something that you are passionate about. Please reach out to us through the talk page to let us know your thoughts and how we may work together and improve this article so that even someone with no knowledge of linguistics can learn about small clauses. Laurasegriffin ( talk) 21:33, 7 April 2019 (UTC)
I understand that you've been doing this work for a long time and clearly value Wikipedia editing a great deal. I can empathise with your perspective and am grateful for the constructive feedback you've been giving us.
Sounds good! I'll go back and re-format the English examples to be in normal test, following the examples you have posted previously. TFor the interlinear glosses, I think there are two options. One of them is using a table to have a word-by-word breakdown, and the other is to have the format I'm currently using which also uses a larger text size. Looking at other articles for reference, Logophoricity uses the current format that I've been using. Please let me know what version you prefer so I can fix the examples!
Thank you for the critique! I'll go back and change them.
I think that seems like a good outline! For small clauses in other languages, can we make it a separate section? So it will be: 1. Definition 2. Examples (in English) 3. Structural Analyses 4. Arguments for and against the two analyses 4.1 & 4.2 5. Small clauses in other languages Thank you so much for all of your comments! Laurasegriffin ( talk) 06:08, 8 April 2019 (UTC)
Yes, your suggested outline sounds good to me. Concerning interlinear glosses, the necessity to include them increases as one reaches to languages that are less known. Examples from languages related to English (German, French, etc.) may not need the strict glosses, whereas examples from less-widely known languages require strict glossing. I think the examples you are producing from Persian, Welsh, etc. need the strict glossing. The tables are good for those examples. Interlinear glosses in table format have been added! Laurasegriffin ( talk) 22:13, 10 April 2019 (UTC)
Concerning what others have done in other articles, I think there is a lot of disorganized material out there. Take for example the notes you are producing. Compare your notes with the notes in the article here; the notes there give a sentence or two about the what is being cited and its relevance, whereby the actual sources are listed in the reference list. I think this practice is best, since it helps the reader understand what is being cited.
I see, that's not a style that I'm familiar with. Let me look into it more! Laurasegriffin ( talk) 22:13, 10 April 2019 (UTC)
Another issue concerns your use of brackets. You use brackets as the default mechanism to mark small clauses, whereas I originally used bold script. The problem with brackets is that they are the typical means used in many syntax texts to mark constituents, hence the very convention you are using to mark small clauses suggests that they are constituents, meaning you have not produced a neutral account. I therefore suggest that you switch to bold script (or some other convention, e.g. the underline, perhaps), since bold script is more neutral. -- Tjo3ya ( talk) 12:58, 8 April 2019 (UTC) I changed examples added to use bold script, or in cases where the bold script was obligatory (e.g. in the table format) I added the underline. Laurasegriffin ( talk) 22:13, 10 April 2019 (UTC)
Tjo3ya, thank you for your work on the small clauses article and the other Wikipedia articles that you work on. We are aware that you are a published syntactician and that is why we want to work with you on this article. We are students and that is why we will sometimes make errors - we are still learning but we (3 of us in this group) are passionate about this subject and about linguistics in general. That is why we picked this subject on Wikipedia. We ask that you give us a little bit of patience as we work on this article and in return we will offer transparency on what we want to accomplish with this project and we will strive to include you in the process. For the sake of this transparency, here is a list of the changes that we would like to add to this article:
1. General accessibility: this article as it is now is very technical and not accessible to the general public who may not have an extensive knowledge of syntax. We want to make the article more accessible by simplifying the language while retaining the nuances so that anyone can understand this article regardless of their background.
2. We also want to include more examples of small clauses in languages other than English so that small clauses can be understood to be a universal phenomenon and that their behaviour can be unique depending on the language
3. Thank you for your positive reception to our history section, we are still doing research and are planning on expanding it
4. We would like to include more detailed examples of x-bar theory. We understand that your area of expertise is dependency grammar and it has advantages over x-bar theory (particularly in examining cases where constituency is not clear), but x-bar theory can still be a useful framework for examining small clauses, particularly in cases where movement is suspected. We will keep in mind that constituency is not a universally-held concept and we will make our language more neutral in that respect.
This is our general plan for this article. We read every one of the critiques provided for us and we take them very seriously. As suggested, we will continue to post all of our proposed edits to the talk page and we will leave them up for 3 days so that we can address and correct for any concerns you may have, and hopefully post those edits to the main article once those 3 days have elapsed. We will strive to have less redundancies, include better citations (with page numbers!) and we will try to adhere to the organizational structure that you have started
Again, thank you for your work and all your comments. We know that you only edit our contributions because you want to maintain the quality of the article, and we want to demonstrate that we also believe in maintaining quality while also adding more knowledge to the article. We look forward to working with you!
Csstudent300 ( talk) 18:54, 8 April 2019 (UTC)
I am planning to add content to a history section, and have uploaded the content into my sandbox here: /info/en/?search=User:Laurasegriffin/sandbox . Any and all comments are encouraged! After including any comments, I intend to upload this content on April 16, 2019. Laurasegriffin ( talk) 23:37, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
Thank you for your comments. Page numbers had been included, and are now clearly marked. The examples from Williams' original 1975 paper were taken verbatim from Julie Balazs' 2012 thesis. I have linked it here: https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/31215 Laurasegriffin ( talk) 21:57, 17 April 2019 (UTC)
I have begun drafting sections for French examples and Lithuanian examples in my sandbox: /info/en/?search=User:Laurasegriffin/sandbox . I intend on uploading these examples on April 16, 2019. Any and all comments are welcome! Laurasegriffin ( talk) 02:17, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
Thank you for your comments. Do you mean the labels "NP AP" to show the category of small clause? I have now added these labels to the examples themselves to clearly show what exactly is the NP and what exactly is the AP. Laurasegriffin ( talk) 22:01, 17 April 2019 (UTC)
I have begun drafting an addition to the X-Bar Theory Structure section on my sandbox here: /info/en/?search=User:Csstudent300/sandbox I Intend to upload this section when I am finished, sometime around April 18th, 2019. Please bring any issues to my attention before then, thank you.
Csstudent300 ( talk) 21:59, 17 April 2019 (UTC)
This developing article has numerous issues. I continue to be skeptical about the value of this project for content in Wikipedia in general. Please convey this comment to your professor, whose work I continue to do here. I've just skimmed the new content. Here are some problems and suggestions for improvement:
1. The numbering of examples should be consistent throughout the entire article. The convention employed should be consistent. I prefer the convention that enumerates the examples in order in each section, and then restarts for each new section.
2. The names of individual linguists should not generally appear in the main text. If it is necessary to mention them, their names can appear in the notes. It is appropriate to mention only the most prominent of linguists in the main text. See the debate on this issue going on for the article on non-configurational languages.
3. Brackets are still appearing in many places to mark small clauses. Please change to bold script, a more neutral way to mark the small clauses.
4. I am against including the section on the X-bar analysis. It is too dense and technical and not understandable to the average Wikipedia reader. If such a section is necessary, it might appear in the article on X-bar theory.
If I spend more time, I will certainly find further problems. These points are enough for the time being, however. To end on a more positive note, I think the sections on coordination in other languages can in fact be a valuable contribution (assuming further improvement, though). -- Tjo3ya ( talk) 07:36, 19 April 2019 (UTC)
![]() | This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||
|
"We will be providing structural edits and adding new content to this page focused on SMALL CLAUSES. This is part of a course-based activity of a 3rd year syntax course, and we anticipate having completed our edits by the end of December. We would appreciate any and all constructive comments and suggestions about how to improve the overall quality of this article." Rachken Ammurr Rosabellec ( talk) 19:34, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
I know that the first example should be removed or replaced, as the verb "painted" selects not a clause but a direct and indirect object. I think that "the house blue" is no more a small clause than "the book to Mary" is in "I gave the book to Mary".
Additionally, I'm not so sure about "make" selecting for a clause either, since it seems to me that it, once again, has a direct and indirect object instead.
Urizen 10:28, 26 August 2007 (UTC)
How can we know that the French examples all involve a small clause? A couple of the examples have a relative clause that could perhaps be attached to the preceding noun. Consider, for instance, the following English sentences:
The relative clause who was smoking in (b) modifies the professor. How do we know that the same is not true in sentence (a)? In other words, how do we know that we are dealing with a small clause in (a)? -- Tjo3ya ( talk) 03:58, 28 March 2019 (UTC)
Thank you for your comment! I hadn't realized that (a) and (b) were relative clauses rather than small clauses, I'll fix that. Can you clarify what you mean about "a straightforward manner"? Laurasegriffin ( talk) 00:21, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
I'm planning to add the following content user:Laurasegriffin/sandbox to the Definition section to clarify small clause behaviour, add more structure, and introduce evidence for alternative perspectives regarding small clause behaviour. Any and all comments regarding accuracy & style are welcome! I intend to post this content on April 6, 2019 if there are no objections. Laurasegriffin ( talk) 23:03, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
The content from sandbox has been added! If anyone has any comments or concerns, please let me know here in the talk page, and I will make corrections ASAP. Laurasegriffin ( talk) 04:48, 7 April 2019 (UTC)
Hello, thank you for your comments! I have several comments.
1: please advise where you think redundancy occurs/rambling occurs, so I can correct it. I'm not sure specifically what you consider rambling.
There was discussion of the contradictory data in the structural analysis, but there were some contradictions in other data, e.g. pseudoclefting. I wasn't sure how the discussion in the structural analysis explained the pseudoclefting contradictions, so I created a separate section to discuss this. I haven't abandoned my section on the history of the small clause. Stay tuned for a draft in the next week or so!
2: Interlinear glosses will be added. Formatting for examples will also be fixed.
I had posted the examples in my sandbox sans glosses since I wasn't sure if Wikipedia articles required interlinear glosses or not. Some Wiki pages, such as Logophoricity, use interlinear glosses while others, such as French pronouns, don't. That being said, I'm learning from my mistake and I will rectify it!
3: For example (a), "that Mary entered" is not a small clause. I'm not sure this is a good example for proform substitution. There are multiple ways to communicate the same idea, but that doesn't mean the small clause analysis is necessarily wrong. If you have alternate sources that support your flat analysis, please include them so that way this article can represent different viewpoints.
I understand your point now, thank you!
4: I will move the constituency tests down to "Detecting Small Clauses" since having this information in two separate sections could be considered redundancy.
Yes, precisely.
5: Please consider revising content we add rather than deleting it. We wish to work with you to improve the small clause article and to have a collaborative approach involving you rather than having an edit war. As you know, we are doing this for a school project but we still wish to see the article improved from its current C rating to a higher rating. We would like to have you involved in this process as it is clearly something that you are passionate about. Please reach out to us through the talk page to let us know your thoughts and how we may work together and improve this article so that even someone with no knowledge of linguistics can learn about small clauses. Laurasegriffin ( talk) 21:33, 7 April 2019 (UTC)
I understand that you've been doing this work for a long time and clearly value Wikipedia editing a great deal. I can empathise with your perspective and am grateful for the constructive feedback you've been giving us.
Sounds good! I'll go back and re-format the English examples to be in normal test, following the examples you have posted previously. TFor the interlinear glosses, I think there are two options. One of them is using a table to have a word-by-word breakdown, and the other is to have the format I'm currently using which also uses a larger text size. Looking at other articles for reference, Logophoricity uses the current format that I've been using. Please let me know what version you prefer so I can fix the examples!
Thank you for the critique! I'll go back and change them.
I think that seems like a good outline! For small clauses in other languages, can we make it a separate section? So it will be: 1. Definition 2. Examples (in English) 3. Structural Analyses 4. Arguments for and against the two analyses 4.1 & 4.2 5. Small clauses in other languages Thank you so much for all of your comments! Laurasegriffin ( talk) 06:08, 8 April 2019 (UTC)
Yes, your suggested outline sounds good to me. Concerning interlinear glosses, the necessity to include them increases as one reaches to languages that are less known. Examples from languages related to English (German, French, etc.) may not need the strict glosses, whereas examples from less-widely known languages require strict glossing. I think the examples you are producing from Persian, Welsh, etc. need the strict glossing. The tables are good for those examples. Interlinear glosses in table format have been added! Laurasegriffin ( talk) 22:13, 10 April 2019 (UTC)
Concerning what others have done in other articles, I think there is a lot of disorganized material out there. Take for example the notes you are producing. Compare your notes with the notes in the article here; the notes there give a sentence or two about the what is being cited and its relevance, whereby the actual sources are listed in the reference list. I think this practice is best, since it helps the reader understand what is being cited.
I see, that's not a style that I'm familiar with. Let me look into it more! Laurasegriffin ( talk) 22:13, 10 April 2019 (UTC)
Another issue concerns your use of brackets. You use brackets as the default mechanism to mark small clauses, whereas I originally used bold script. The problem with brackets is that they are the typical means used in many syntax texts to mark constituents, hence the very convention you are using to mark small clauses suggests that they are constituents, meaning you have not produced a neutral account. I therefore suggest that you switch to bold script (or some other convention, e.g. the underline, perhaps), since bold script is more neutral. -- Tjo3ya ( talk) 12:58, 8 April 2019 (UTC) I changed examples added to use bold script, or in cases where the bold script was obligatory (e.g. in the table format) I added the underline. Laurasegriffin ( talk) 22:13, 10 April 2019 (UTC)
Tjo3ya, thank you for your work on the small clauses article and the other Wikipedia articles that you work on. We are aware that you are a published syntactician and that is why we want to work with you on this article. We are students and that is why we will sometimes make errors - we are still learning but we (3 of us in this group) are passionate about this subject and about linguistics in general. That is why we picked this subject on Wikipedia. We ask that you give us a little bit of patience as we work on this article and in return we will offer transparency on what we want to accomplish with this project and we will strive to include you in the process. For the sake of this transparency, here is a list of the changes that we would like to add to this article:
1. General accessibility: this article as it is now is very technical and not accessible to the general public who may not have an extensive knowledge of syntax. We want to make the article more accessible by simplifying the language while retaining the nuances so that anyone can understand this article regardless of their background.
2. We also want to include more examples of small clauses in languages other than English so that small clauses can be understood to be a universal phenomenon and that their behaviour can be unique depending on the language
3. Thank you for your positive reception to our history section, we are still doing research and are planning on expanding it
4. We would like to include more detailed examples of x-bar theory. We understand that your area of expertise is dependency grammar and it has advantages over x-bar theory (particularly in examining cases where constituency is not clear), but x-bar theory can still be a useful framework for examining small clauses, particularly in cases where movement is suspected. We will keep in mind that constituency is not a universally-held concept and we will make our language more neutral in that respect.
This is our general plan for this article. We read every one of the critiques provided for us and we take them very seriously. As suggested, we will continue to post all of our proposed edits to the talk page and we will leave them up for 3 days so that we can address and correct for any concerns you may have, and hopefully post those edits to the main article once those 3 days have elapsed. We will strive to have less redundancies, include better citations (with page numbers!) and we will try to adhere to the organizational structure that you have started
Again, thank you for your work and all your comments. We know that you only edit our contributions because you want to maintain the quality of the article, and we want to demonstrate that we also believe in maintaining quality while also adding more knowledge to the article. We look forward to working with you!
Csstudent300 ( talk) 18:54, 8 April 2019 (UTC)
I am planning to add content to a history section, and have uploaded the content into my sandbox here: /info/en/?search=User:Laurasegriffin/sandbox . Any and all comments are encouraged! After including any comments, I intend to upload this content on April 16, 2019. Laurasegriffin ( talk) 23:37, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
Thank you for your comments. Page numbers had been included, and are now clearly marked. The examples from Williams' original 1975 paper were taken verbatim from Julie Balazs' 2012 thesis. I have linked it here: https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/31215 Laurasegriffin ( talk) 21:57, 17 April 2019 (UTC)
I have begun drafting sections for French examples and Lithuanian examples in my sandbox: /info/en/?search=User:Laurasegriffin/sandbox . I intend on uploading these examples on April 16, 2019. Any and all comments are welcome! Laurasegriffin ( talk) 02:17, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
Thank you for your comments. Do you mean the labels "NP AP" to show the category of small clause? I have now added these labels to the examples themselves to clearly show what exactly is the NP and what exactly is the AP. Laurasegriffin ( talk) 22:01, 17 April 2019 (UTC)
I have begun drafting an addition to the X-Bar Theory Structure section on my sandbox here: /info/en/?search=User:Csstudent300/sandbox I Intend to upload this section when I am finished, sometime around April 18th, 2019. Please bring any issues to my attention before then, thank you.
Csstudent300 ( talk) 21:59, 17 April 2019 (UTC)
This developing article has numerous issues. I continue to be skeptical about the value of this project for content in Wikipedia in general. Please convey this comment to your professor, whose work I continue to do here. I've just skimmed the new content. Here are some problems and suggestions for improvement:
1. The numbering of examples should be consistent throughout the entire article. The convention employed should be consistent. I prefer the convention that enumerates the examples in order in each section, and then restarts for each new section.
2. The names of individual linguists should not generally appear in the main text. If it is necessary to mention them, their names can appear in the notes. It is appropriate to mention only the most prominent of linguists in the main text. See the debate on this issue going on for the article on non-configurational languages.
3. Brackets are still appearing in many places to mark small clauses. Please change to bold script, a more neutral way to mark the small clauses.
4. I am against including the section on the X-bar analysis. It is too dense and technical and not understandable to the average Wikipedia reader. If such a section is necessary, it might appear in the article on X-bar theory.
If I spend more time, I will certainly find further problems. These points are enough for the time being, however. To end on a more positive note, I think the sections on coordination in other languages can in fact be a valuable contribution (assuming further improvement, though). -- Tjo3ya ( talk) 07:36, 19 April 2019 (UTC)