User talk:Doric Loon

This is the talk page of Doric Loon, which is the Wikipedia nickname of Graeme Dunphy. When you begin a new message section here, I will respond to it here. When I leave message on your talk page, I will expect your response there. This maintains discussion threads and continuity.

Where I live, in Germany, the time now is 01:50 [refresh]. If it's the middle of the night or during the working day I may well not be online.

to-infinitive versus to-infinitive phrase

A bit of reiteration for what it's worth... In 2020, my inadvertent use here re "to-infinitive phrase" stemmed from how I habitually use that term in my own yet-unpublished lexicon. Some colleagues assail the term as they see "phrase" to be superfluous. Perhaps needless to say, I disagree. My reasons are twofold: (1) the term describes something that has at least two discrete constituents rather than an ABC-XYZ compound, and (2) linguistically unevolved commentators occasionally refer to to-infinitives as clauses rather than phrases. Grrr. Even so, I don't disparage misfit terminology in my personal interactions, and I don't characterize my own terminology as being anything other than descriptive. I can say, however, that - axiomatically speaking - unlike the zillion conflicting linguistic terms floating around the universe, the 800 linguistic terms in my own paradigm have no inconsistencies whatsoever. At least none that I nor anyone else has yet found. Nonetheless I hold my breath since my work is only 96.7% done. One false definition or random encoding error will sink the entire endeavor.

And, yes, my lexicon includes a one-off mention of split infinitive together with its definition: "An outmoded taxon (invented in the early 19th century) relating to syntax that comprises an adverb or an adverbial phrase occluded within a to-infinitive phrase." My one-off mentions of full infinitive and split to-infinitive phrase are similarly short-shrifted. Cheers. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 16:01, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

@Kent Dominic: How would you feel about just "infinitive phrase", parallel to "noun phrase" etc. A noun phrase includes the noun and its article (the dog) and also any adjective (the black dog), whereby the adjective is part of the NP. Nobody would describe "the black dog" as a split noun. If we are abandoning the idea of the full infinitive and understanding it as a single-word infinitive plus a particle marker (which is analagous to an article in some ways), then a full infinitive is a phrase parallel to a NP, and any adverb attached to the infinitive, no matter where it is placed, is part of the phrase, rather than a separate thing that splits the phrase. --Doric Loon (talk) 16:20, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

By itself, "infinitive phrase" sounds murky to me. Apart from to-infinitive phrases, there are tons of other phrases with infinitives that I'm loath to call "bare" e.g., in normal stuff like "you might be right" or in elliptical stuff like "come see me tomorrow" (where either "to" is elliptical or "and" is elliptical under an asyndetic analysis, depending on the semantic intent). I'm no diehard adherent to either dependency grammar or phrase structure grammar, but in either discipline I'd say "infinitive phrase" covers too much ground for my comfort level. Kinda like how I feel when people insist that a verb catena entails a main verb. No lie: one of my ESL students asked, "why is go the main verb in 'Did he go?' when the answer ellipsis can be either 'Yes, he did' or 'Yes, he went'"? My answer: neither did nor go is a main verb; "did" is an auxiliary verb in both the question and the answer ellipsis and "go" is an infinitive in either case. I'd have been hard pressed to explain why "to go" is an infinitive phrase while "did go" isn't. If you argue from a head word perspective, we get back to the main verb conundrum.

Btw, I fully get what you mean with your noun phrase analogy, but I'm quick to point out that your post excludes the notion that a prepositional phrase, in its entirety, constitutes a noun phrase under some linguistic analyses. That's why I committed to a wholesale axiomatic set (with the initial help of logicians and mathematicians rather than linguists) of linguistic terms for my own lexicon. Some 800 cross-linked linguistic terms later, I'm very nearly done. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 17:04, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

P-stranding

The asinine posts (by you-know-who) on the P-stranding talk page alerted me to how the article needs more urgent attention than I'd originally thought. Despite how I consider P-stranding to be a linguistic bastard child, I'd sleep better with a lead something like this: "In the history of English language aesthetics, preposition stranding, sometimes called P-stranding, is the syntactic construction in which an adposition occurs somewhere other than antecedent to a collocated object; for example, at the end of a sentence." Comments? Substitute "erstwhile preposition" for "adposition"? --Kent Dominic·(talk) 19:52, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

@Kent Dominic: Hey, you stole my phrase! :-D

I agree with you in principle. Nobody today seriously complains that "a preposition is the very worst word to end a sentence with." As you know, I am particularly interested in historical developments, so all these old rules that at one time had immense cultural importance (they weighed heavily on generations of poor schoolchildren) seem to me to be worth writing about as historical artifacts. From a linguistic point of view, the constructions used in modern English are interesting. But those are two different things, and I think a lot of the arguments we have seen on these pages have resulted from muddled thinking about that. However, I have not delved into p-stranding to the extent that I have with the split infinitive, so I don't really know who is saying what. But this ngram suggests that there is a difference between the two situations: ngram split infinitive & preposition stranding. Please remember that whether you like a term is relatively unimportant here (though not entirely) and your own track record makes me feel you have to be a little bit careful about trying to expurge your own pet dislikes (no offence intended). So we need to know if p-stranding really is terminology used by some schools of linguistics, or if it is only used by old-style grammarians. In the latter case I would support your suggestion; in the former, you need a more complicated fix. --Doric Loon (talk) 09:02, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Thinking more about your suggestion, I do like it, but there are two things I am missing. The first is that in English this relates almost entirely to relative clauses and wh-questions. The second is the sense of movement. If we compare:

1. To what do I owe the pleasure?
2. What do I owe the pleasure to?

it should be obvious that they are parallel, and a comparative study of the Germanic languages shows that the former is older, and the adposition definitely is a PREposition, and the latter is a derived form where a movement has occurred, and we can say the preposition has become a postposition. I wouldn't call it a particle, because that makes particle to the "dustbin category" and obscures the fact that "to" still relates to "what" in and adpositional manner. That doesn't all have to go into the first sentence, but I think it is all key. --Doric Loon (talk) 12:39, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

It seems we're mostly preaching to the same choir re the semantic parallels. Re the choir analogy, its members are comprised of ESL students, and the choir directors are ESL instructors who typically know less grammar terminology than their students. Indeed, those very students often ask questions like, "What does 'to' mean in the 'What do I owe the pleasure to?' construction?" They mostly guess an elliptical to-infinitive is at play and are stunned to hear the P-stranding explanation that middle-aged ESL instructors dust off from their own elementary school days. Why the stunned effect? Not from the semantics involved but from purported transposition of syntax. E.g. In English, we say "I'm going to the restaurant. Transliterated into Korean, it's "Ssikdang e ggaio" (lit. "Restaurant to I-go" since Korean has neither periphrastic articles nor a true present progressive, and the subject is suffixed to the verb). After hearing the P-stranding explanation, they know their own language doesn't allow a nonsensical "Ssikdang ggaio e" transposition but they ask, "In English, can I use P-stranding to say, e.g., 'I'm going the restaurant to'"? Fair question from a bright student, but the less bright make the transposition on their own and fault English for its apparent capriciousness upon getting corrected by the ESL instructor.

To be clear, the adpositions in the Korean language constitute entirely discrete lexical items depending on whether it's prepositional or postpositional. Every so often, a Korean student complains that English should have a similar class of postpositions that are distinct from our prepositions to make ESL acquisition easier. (Did Old English have such a class? Beats me.) In my experience, when I identify a postpositional particle as such rather than as part of a P-stranding dynamic, it clicks with students immediately. And I totally get your objections to terming it a postpositional particle rather than a postposition, but hear me out...

Worldwide, it seems, people (i.e., those who care about this hair-splitting stuff) know that a particle is a small word that performs a relatively minor syntactic role compared to most other lexical items. They readily understand how "Put in a good word" involves "in" as an adverbial particle, not a preposition re a phrasal verb. Yet they less easily see how "Put a good word in" is semantically parallel despite the transposition of the the adverbial particle. For me, the nexus between an adverbial particle and a postpositional particle is a dynamic that P-stranding fails to take into account. Here's what I mean...

As you pointed out in your recent post on the phrasal verb talk page, there are clear conceptual distinctions between a verb/adverbial particle collocation versus a verb/preposition collocation. The terminology is mostly irrelevant to the resulting colloquial construction for native English speakers. So, to call "run into" a phrasal verb or a verb phrase doesn't change the meaning for us in the "I ran into trouble" construction. Yet it makes a seminal difference to someone who's trying to work out whether it means "I encountered (vt.) trouble" or "I blundered (vi.) into trouble." Having the phalanx of separable versus inseparable phrasal verb rules makes ESL students' heads spin. Can I say, "I ran trouble into"? That's how ESLers react. "Why not? 'Run into" is a phrasal verb..." they say.

I really do laugh and cry at statements like "a phrasal verb is the combination of two or three words from different grammatical categories – a verb and a particle, such as an adverb or a preposition." So, so naïve. I'd give more credit to an iteration such as "a phrasal verb is the collocation of two or three words from different grammatical categories – a verb and a particle, such as an adverbial particle or a prepositional particle." Otherwise, the phrase "look up to" is a phrasal verb? Really? Not a verb phrase whose syntax comprised three words from different grammatical categories? Why not write it as "lookupto" so I know it's inseparable? And isn't "My father is a man to whom I look up?" an instance of separating the verb?"

No, Doric Loon: Those aren't questions off the top of my head. I can't overemphasize how they're real-life questions from actual ESL students. They're rightfully puzzled by the disparate linguistic characterizations like the P-stranding article, inter alia, have mix-matched in line with the host of ad hoc linguistic characterizations that abound. Who has the time and interest to create a Linguistic Grand Unification Theory that addresses all this stuff, starting with split infinitives and moving on to P-Stranding, etc.? Would Wikipedia be ready for it? Not by the likes of an User:AnonMoos et al.

I truly empathize with the AnonMooses of the world who simultaneously accept a beloved-yet-naïve linguistic relic like P-stranding and knee jerk against a modern approach based in paradigmatic set theory. "Where's your reliable source?" It's in your head, a priori. "Where's your evidence?" It's in the same place, once you think it through. "Kent Dominic, you're good at issuing dogmatic and unsupported denunciations." Well. they're hardly dogmatic but they're assuredly axiomatic; they're definitely supported by paradigmatic set logic analysis and no more supported by the naïve set analysis prevalent in these articles. As a codicil, those "denunciations" are better characterized as lamentations since I don't blame Wiki editors for trying to summarize an outmoded approach to linguistics. "Outmoded?" Right: Says me. And, so says Doric Loon, apparently. I'm "wasting everybody else's time"? If only I had such power. People waste their own time by blithely reading and accepting such bilge that the P-Stranding article uncritically parrots from an anachronistic perspective. Unfortunately for the AnonMooses out there, very little exists by way of published, axiomatic, modern approaches to this linguistic morass.

The key you've struck upon, Doric Loon, is to call P-Stranding what it is: a vestige of back-assward linguistic terminology. Otherwise, the uninitiated can't help but wonder whether "at" is an adverbial particle or a stranded preposition in the "What are you looking at?" construction. In Wiktionary, look at is tagged as a verb. Ha! (To its credit, "look" and "at" are hyperlinked to separate entries re SOP.) In Webster, it's defined under look but neither tagged nor parsed re SOP. It's not entered at Oxford - apparently an SOP collocation. I think Oxford got it best. In my lexicon, I tag "look at it this way" as an intransitive verb phrase whose SOP are identified and further defined in turn. That bit of parsing conflicts with Webster, whose untagged definition for "look at" is the transitive "CONSIDER ... CONFRONT, FACE." No argument from me re semantics. Syntactically, however, they're on very shaky ground. Do native English readers typically care whether a verb/adverbial particle versus a verb/preposition entails a transitive or intransitive verb? My gut says no. It's critical, however, to non-native ESLers.

After all this, Doric Loon, whether you take a kick or a pass at the P-Stranding article, I'm with you all the way. I was content to let it rot into irrelevance until AnonMoos jumped into the fray. AnonMoos, if you've (*ahem*) wasted your time in reading and properly digesting all of this, you should know by now that Doric Loon seems to share my aversion to attempting Band-Aid fixes re articles that have mostly lost their linguistic cogency. Do I trust Doric Loon's "unsupported" recommendations? You betcha, because they make perfectly clear a priori sense. Do they comply with Wikipedia guidance re reliable sources? Yes, if no one complains because the sense is plainly evident; no, if someone complains. AnonMoos, if Doric Loon and I move forward on this P-Stranding thing, our consensus has you outnumbered 2:1. If, by chance, you have any smidgen of linguistic sense to prompt my rethinking the approach that Doric Loon and I have in mind, then by all means, AnonMoos, please expound. Fair warning, AnonMoos: one more ad hominem attack will land you on my Blocked Editor list. Cheers. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 19:05, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

@Kent Dominic: Hi, I hope I didn't give the impression I thought you were wasting everyone's time: you have good stuff to say. I agree with much of it. Where I think we differ is that you tend to get annoyed by terminology that you find not ideal. I don't mind what we call a thing as long as it is precise and everyone knows what we mean. So if a split infinitive doesn't really involve an infinitive being split, you would want to replace the term, whereas I am pragmatic, and recognizing we have a construction that we need to be able to talk about, and I am content to work with whatever term most people know. Which doesn't stop us then challenging assumptions about the construction.

Try not to take resistance to your suggestions too personally. Be patient, avoid being confrontational, and remember that improving Wikipedia is a job for the long haul. So don't be disheartened. --Doric Loon (talk) 20:09, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

I appreciate the sentiment. Truth be told, I'm not as annoyed by the terminology as I am by (a) linguists who are out of date and out of touch concerning the terminology, (b) lexicographers who haven't yet learned how to compile and crosslink big data in the interest of accurately defining linguistic terms, and (c) the AnonMooses of the world who haven't yet figured out that the linguistic stuff cited in Wikipedia is only as good as assessed on its own merit according to the acumen of the assessor. To be clear, I don't have a prescriptive bone in my body when it comes to terminology. Evidence: I regularly tweak articles whose linguistic underpinnings are hopelessly combobulated and haplessly outdated. I do it for the benefit of people who are inured to old school grammar. Pragmatically speaking, it's all we've got publication-wise.

So, I 100% agree re the pragmatics of discussing P-stranding and I-splitting with those who either swear by swear by it or who can't wrap their heads around what a prepositive, interpositive, or postpositive anything might be. Moreover, I don't cringe at the sound of a relative pronoun, a past participle or a present participle despite how I'm hard pressed to use those terms on my own anymore. I'm well-versed in those terms' etymology, accede their historical utility, and admit how most traditionalists would go apeshit upon reading how my lexicon has deep-sixed the terms in favor of ones that far surpass them re millennial currency an interlingual cogency.

Am I a lone voice ranting in the wilderness? I'll let you in on a secret: What User:AnonMoos misconstrued as "tantrums" are just my lampooning of editors who take archaic linguistic stuff at face value. My favorite lampoon was a jab within a jab at what's-his-name, who coined the term, "relativizer." I love what he was trying to accomplish, but he was pumping linguistic water into an etymologically broken bucket. Did you miss that lampoon? You'll find it here. And if you don't know how we got stuck the precursor that relativizer was intended to remedy, good luck finding the history in the relative pronoun article. Ha! --Kent Dominic·(talk) 00:33, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

@Kent Dominic: OK, I don't understand you: I just made an edit to preposition stranding which went in the direction you said you wanted, and you effectively reverted it. You were not happy with the term "preposition stranding". I introduced a note that two other terms are also in use. You moved them down the article out of the spotlight and tagged them as "historical", which most people will understand as irrelevant. Actually they are not historical. The Webster reference is bang up to date, and although Fowler is an older source, most people who are not involved in this debate would still express it the way he did. An Ngram search will show you that while preposition stranding is the most common term today, the other two have not lost popularity. So what the heck are you playing at? Variant terminology, unless it is fringe, belongs in the first sentence. I don't want to edit war with you, but I think you should put those back where they were. --Doric Loon (talk) 23:41, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Oops. Things kinda got turned around after I uploaded an edit that didn't stick due to a Wikipedia maintenance snafu. Meanwhile, I hadn't fully registered how your intermediate edit changed what I'd intended with my "historically..." part. I'll re-edit it to try properly taking into account your new stuff. If you want to add a different wrinkle, by no means would I consider it edit warring. I just want it to be as right as possible given what we've got to work with. So, have a look at it again in a few minutes and have another go at it, if need be. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 01:30, 15 January 2022 (UTC)
____

Okay, so I've finished the re-edit. My dilemma: You're absolutely right re your characterization and cites but, for the time being, we're stuck with the article's "P-stranding" title and theme. I'd have no qualms about changing the title to better reflect the linguistic underpinnings re the modern variants you've uploaded despite how I still gripe to myself that the lexical items involved are in fact postpositions rather than prepositions. (I know, I know: that perspective has no place in the article, but I'm just sayin'.)
I hope you'll agree that, as it stands, it's best to try to define P-stranding terminologically in the lead sentence since all current directs and re-directs correspond to Preposition stranding, not to terms that have more modern currency. Some food for thought: if you don't feel comfortable with my latest edit, try "Historically, preposition stranding or P-stranding is the syntactic construction in which a so-called stranded, hanging or dangling preposition occurs somewhere other than immediately before its corresponding object; for example, at the end of a sentence, in a manner termed by modern linguists as a sentence-terminal preposition or as a preposition at the end." Or something to that effect esp. if you can think of anything better.
Again, sorry for alarm I caused in not properly reading/editing your recent contribution to the article. Tiredness will do that. Just look at how many typos my initial edit to your edit entailed. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 02:10, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Apologies if I seemed unduly sharp yesterday - it had been a long day. This is better, though it now suggests that "preposition at the end" is more recent - in fact I think that is what it was called in the 18th century but it is still what most of us would say. That Webster article suggests you would use either "preposition stranding" or "terminal preposition" if you want to impress or alienate your friends. You are right that to call it a preposition when it is not before the word is odd, but postposition or adposition are simply not words most people know, and it's not helpful to introduce obscure terms just to be hypercorrect. (German has two prepositions, entlang and gegenüber, which regularly come after their noun, but if you were to call them postpositions anywhere outside a linguistics class you would rightly be decried as a Klugscheißer - why on earth would one unnecessarily burden DaF students with that?) Actually, the term "preposition stranding" has an advantage here, because it sort of implies that it was a preposition before it was stranded, which historically is not wrong.

Whatever the relative merits, though, the title of the article is not going to be changed. Wikipedia has a strict rule of following common usage, which almost always trumps any other considerations in choosing an article title. The ngrams are pretty conclusive on this, and on that basis I would oppose a name change, even though I don't like the current title. Besides, there are clearly other editors there who are defending the article against anything too radical, so that's not worth fighting. What we want to do is get alternative terminology as early in the article as possible, and somewhere further down maybe have a section on terminology that charts the history (who called it what when) and the relative merits of the terms. Before trying that, however, it would be really useful to find some written source where a linguist discusses these things - otherwise we will (quite rightly) be hit with accusations of OR. --Doric Loon (talk) 16:46, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

All of that makes sense. I'm only peripherally familiar with the Wikipedia rules and guidelines re changing an article's name, so I have to defer to your take on that landscape. And, I readily admit how most presumably native English speakers are unfamiliar with what adpositions and postpositions entail, but more on that later. For now, please comment on this: "Historically, preposition stranding or P-stranding is the syntactic construction in which a stranded, hanging or dangling preposition occurs somewhere other than immediately before its corresponding object; for example, at the end of a sentence, in a manner treated as a sentence-terminal preposition or as a preposition at the end." No OR there.

I agree it would be useful to find published sources where linguists discuss the preposition-versus-postposition characterization, but I hesitate to do it myself. Not that I'm lazy, but in all my reading on the topic, I've found that linguists who discuss a particular adpositional construction, as it pertains to non-English languages, tend to use postposition as a given rather than what English-language grammarians traditionally still call a preposition - in a quite attenuated sense of the term - re P-stranding. Besides my not wanting to get called out for OR in describing all of that in the article here, I confess not wanting to get caught up in any WP:COI crosshairs later this year if someone sees the nexus between my (*ahem*) conditioning rants on the talk pages here and my own axiomatic (sorry, User:AnonMoos: the word really is axiomatic, not dogmatic) statements on the topic as addressed in my soon to be published lexicon of grammatical terms.

In short, what's your opinion re this latest iteration of the lead as I worded it in the first paragraph of this post? --Kent Dominic·(talk) 18:03, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

I think that definition for the moment is fine, though I would rather have a definition cited directly from an authoritative source to one we wrote ourself. It would be OK to include the word "apparently", something like "a construction in which a preposition appears to have been displaced to the end of a clause", which does justice to current terminology without prejudicing any discussion further down about what is really going on. --Doric Loon (talk) 22:16, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Some WP:OR, for your eyes only

I'm not annoyed by ordinary readers who buy into the P-stranding concept, but I'm perturbed by grammarians who blithely rely on a shallow linguistic approach to parse certain structures by transpositional analogy. Yet, I can suspend my misgivings for a moment to see how "I know what you're talking about" implies "about" as a preposition under a dependency grammar approach that renders a semantically parallel "I know about what you're talking" construction. Yet, from a phrase structure approach, the two constructions mix syntactical apples and oranges re what "about" is doing respectively. Here's the rub...

• The P-stranding article deals with naïve examples like, "What are you looking at?" as semantically parallel to "At what are you looking?" as though "at" is a preposition in both instances. My question, from a phrase structure analysis: is "at" really a preposition or is it an adverbial particle in the "look at" phrasal verb per a subject-verb inversion?
• The article presents equivocal P-stranding examples like "This is the book that I told you about" under a relative clause rubric. The example would be slightly better rendered as "This is the book which I told you about" so that the so-called preposition corresponds to a bona fide pronoun (i.e., "This is the book about which I told you" versus the nonsensical "This is the book about that I told you" transposition). However...
• In the article's "This is the book I told you about" example, a dependency grammar approach must interpolate "which" in a "This is the book about which I told you" interpolation. Semantically fine; syntactically hogwash.
• The article presents only naïve, pedagogical examples while ignoring real-life, colloquial examples where P-stranding's conceptual pons asinorum is on full display, e.g., "I know where he's at" is a nonstandard yet ubiquitous type of construction including "at" as a stranded preposition? Corresponding to (...)? Somebody, please tell me, since there's no object in that example whether explicit (from a phrase structure analysis) or implied (from a dependency structure analysis) that corresponds to "at." In other words, "I know where he's at" is properly construed as postpositive particle that complements "is."
  

No, I'm not claiming that "be at" is a phrasal verb any more than "tell about" is a phrasal verb in a "This is the book I told you about" construction. On the contrary, "I know where he is at" involves an intransitive verb phrase (with "at" as an postpositive adverbial particle) and "This is the book I told you about" involves a transitive verb phrase (with "about" as a postpositive adverbial particle.)

For anyone who doesn't like the null articles corresponding to the links in red text, I suggest reassessing your own linguistic assumptions after doing the needed homework.

Ho-hum: another day, another rant. For your eyes only, unless you decide to put any of this in the P-Stranding article upon finding published sources that compare. Good look with that if you limit yourself to English-language sources. For anyone who's good at cross-linguistic sleuthing, I challenge you to cite how the "to" in a to-infinitive phrase is the only prepositve adverbial particle in the English language. All we need now is for another editor to extend this thread by replying, e.g., that "I need to shush" comprises "need to" as a phrasal verb rather than "to shush" as a to-infinitive phrase. :| --Kent Dominic·(talk) 20:46, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

You know, once your text is published, it becomes a citable source. That gives you a lot more clout. Of course you would have to declare any COI on your talk page (see my talk page for how I did that), but if you are sensible, you can put your published work in as a source for claims you add to articles. CoI will only become an issue if you get into conflicts, so remember it is always better to improve Wikipedia gradually in lots of baby steps, and take people with you, rather than go barging in and trashing what other people have worked on, even if it really is trash. --Doric Loon (talk) 22:20, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Duly taken under advisement re CoI. A word in my own defense: With one exception, I've been cautious not to trash articles for editors' desultory efforts at chronicling antiquated linguistics that are no fault of the editors. My needling is intended to alert the one-in-million editor, like you, who can see through the linguistic shortcomings of the status quo. Occasionally, lexicographers defend their perpetuation of linguistic shortcomings by arguing how they're tasked to chronicle the lexical items, not independently analyze the conceptual (in)sufficiency of the terms. I get the pragmatic angle of their task, but I'm none too pleased with lexicological results that perpetuate linguistic schlock. Similarly, I rant at the wind here re editors' encyclopedic perpetuation of linguistic schlock. So far, poor AnonMoos and User:Andyharbor (look here) are the only editors here who've misconstrued my broadsides at the linguistic community.

As an apology in behalf of linguists prior to the computer age, there was no expedient way to compile and reconcile all the data regarding grammatical and linguistic terminology until the mid-1980s. Bill Gates, inter alia, raised the bar for reconciling the terminological/taxonomical morass. Nonetheless, even as late as 2002, text-based data processing hadn't sufficiently evolved to enable what html encoding and crosslinking can do nowadays with fairly little effort or pain. Truth be told: I'd tried from 2003 to 2005 to encode grammatical terms using symbolic logic rather than text. Computer programming and mathematician colleagues persuaded me to give up. It was an encoding nightmare. Windows 2010 was a godsend that makes all the difference. And the Google bells and whistles enable tracking my work against what's out there in digital content.

Now, Graeme, my humble sense of ego asks you a favor: after you've seen my published work that shuns, e.g., present participle in favor of continuative particple, please avoid asking if I feel chagrinned for making edits like this, et seq.. My motive then was the same as re P-Stranding and S-infinitive: to give some etymological context to terms whose taxonomical utility have outlived their inter-linguistic pragmatics. ESL students fitfully ask questions like, "What does a present participle have to do with sentence like "She was singing"? Or what does a past participle have to do with "You'll be surprised"? My OR (and 13 years of teaching experience re students whose native language is Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, or Thai as well as French, Spanish, Hebrew, and Arabic) is that continuative and perfective terminologies, re aspects, have cognates worldwide; regardless of language. By contrast, past participle and present participle are peculiar to English. Ultimately, in reply to the students who question the names of our participles, the answer is: they're just names that no has bothered to update for centuries on end. Apparently, traditional English-language grammarians define pragmatics as "it's the term we grew up on" rather than "it's what's inter-linguistically current and cogent."

And so it goes with relative pronoun, with past progressive, with copula, and don't get me started on stative verbs. No one took the bait on that rant, which is the only one that chastises the editors here for inarticulately chronicling the published linguistic meanderings on the topic.

Now I'll let you get back to doing something productive. Cheers. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 01:45, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Actually, I thought the terms "present participle" and "past participle" were used for French first, and then transferred to English, but I could easily be quite wrong. For me, these are like the terms "bull market" and "bear market" - they work fine if you just conceptualize the unit, and it doesn't really matter that they have only a tenuous figurative link to bulls and bears. --Doric Loon (talk) 10:58, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Pragmatics versus axiomatic precision re linguistic paradigms

Me: Why not try using these Arabic numerals to count and calculate stuff?
Traditional linguist: Sorry. For expediency's sake, our civilized world is more familiar with Roman numerals.
Forrest Gump: Stupid is as stupid does.
As if you didn't already know my lament on the matter. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 15:41, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

:-) --Doric Loon (talk) 09:51, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Re phrasal verbs

I finally got around to reading the article you linked on the phrasal verb talk page. I'll try to keep my reaction succinct.

I. I agree, in concept, that "A phrasal verb in Present-Day English is a verb that takes a complementary particle, in other words, an adverb resembling a preposition." In my lexicon, such a complementary particle is an adverbial particle.

II. I already was familiar with how the syntax evolved during the relevant period, but I learned some new stuff about Old English morphology.

III. Aside from some random trivia re the etymology of certain compounds, which I can generally place on my own given all the other sleuthing I've done, there was nothing new here for me. Interestingly, however, what I call a postpositive adverbial particle is what Lamont calls a post-positioned adverbial particle: same beast; slightly different terminology. Yet, Lamont doesn't acknowledge a prepositive adverbial particle, i.e., the "to" in a to-infinitive phrase, which constitutes a separate lexical category of phrasal verb in my lexicon. FYI: My lexicon shuns the term, part of speech except to give a historical account of its etymology.

IV. Nothing new for me here.

V. In my view, a three-part phrasal-prepositional verb is a syntactic misnomer. (I'm as strict as it comes re parsing the underlying lexical items into discrete lexical categories. More on that later.) Also, what Lamont terms a lexical verb is what I further break down as a transitive verb or intransitive verb as I have separate lexical categories for transitive phrasal verb (e.g., "put up a good fight") and intransitive phrasal verb (e.g., "let it sink in or "run out of time").

VI.

1. Particle movement. Lamont notices trends and offers proscriptions that leave a sour taste in my mouth based not on whether I disagree but because his statements are naïve rather than axiomatic. As I prefer axiomatic descriptions, my lexicon sharply distinguishes between a phrasal verb (comprised of a verb and an adverbial particle) and a verb phrase, whose definition is bifurcated and used along phrase structure lines and dependency grammar lines, depending on the context. For example, “I gave up the keys" entails a phrasal verb; "I gave the keys up " entails a verb phrase that includes:

• the transitive verb, "gave"
• the transitive object, "keys"
• the postpositive adverbial particle, "up"

In my lexicon, there's no talk of splitting or stranding since a postpositive adverbial particle is in a lexical category of its own. (The same idea accounts for why there's no S-infinitive splitting in my lexicon since "to boldly go" no longer constitutes a phrasal verb but instead comprises "to" and "go" in their respective postpositive adverbial particle and infinitive lexical categories.)

Translation / synonymy: "Phrasal verbs can be translated with a single-unit verb of the same illocutionary force." So far, I agree since he's limiting his analysis to semantics, but I prefer the term "construction" to "translation." I wholeheartedly agree how he takes issue with Quirk et al. (as do you, based on your comments on the phrasal verb talk page.) in my lexicon, such constructions are verb phrases whose SOP comprise collocations of verbs and prepositional phrase. Plain and simple.

As for fixes to the phrasal verb page ...

Per usual, I try to avoid adding fuel to the rampant fires on such pages. Otherwise, I would:

1. Delete the entire Catenae section. It's User:Tjo3ya's brainchild and a bunch of linguistic hooey IMHO. His contributions to that article, as well as to the catena article itself, are flush with original research and ipse dixits masquerading as bona fide secondary statements of linguistic scholarship. What he purports to be a catena in, e.g., "She is looking forward to rest" is mere SOP: "look forward" (as a phrasal verb) and "to" (as traditional particle, or as a prepositive adverbial particle as I put it.) Some riddles: As that example purports a catena as a phrasal verb, why is the particle, "looking", in the mix? And why isn't the (*cough*) catena extended to include the "to rest" to-infinitive? Perhaps only Tjo3ya knows.

2. Delete (if not move) the entire Shifting section as nonrelevant to phrasal verbs.

3. Delete (if not move) the entire Phrasal nouns section as nonrelevant to phrasal verbs.

4. Make a very clear distinction between the scholarly commentary, from published and citable linguistic sources, between phrasal verbs evincing what Lamont describes as (a) a verb + post-positioned adverbial particle versus (b) prepositional verbs. On the phrasal verbs talk page, you've similarly expressed a need to do this

Again, I've got no dog in this fight. For all I care, the article can continue to rot as it is. My two minor edits from 28 April 2020 should hardly be construed as an endorsement of the article's remainder. As I mentioned earlier, I gave up on the article after reading its horrendous lead. A caveat: I did, at another editor's urging, read the Catena (et seq.) section to assess any problems. My conclusion: Not worth my time to find reliable sources to the contrary; not worth the effort of an inevitable edit war with Tjo3ya, who - by antecedent reputation - is as passionate, opinionated, and intractable as they come. And it's beyond my interest to confirm or refute the truth or falsity of TjO3ya's editing persona, so he gets a pass from me re all the tripe he contributed to the articles. Yet, if someone else takes him to task, I'm no shrinking violet when it comes to seconding a laudable effort.

Cheers to all. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 00:39, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

@Kent Dominic: Thanks, that's very helpful. I do intend to do some editing on that page when I get time, but right now we are coming into the exam period, and I expect you know what that means. I intend to be less radial than you suggest, at least at first, because if you delete too much, you get into edit wars and can't do anything constructive any more. But at the very least I want to reorganize it so the two different phenomena are clearly separated in different parts of the article. Then we'll see what the response is, and maybe do more after that. I may well use "post-positioned adverbial particle", since we have a source for it, and that comes close enough to your terminology that you should see the advantage in it. I trust you will be looking over my shoulder and will stick your oar in if there is any controversy. --Doric Loon (talk) 12:44, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

@Doric Loon: If and when you follow up, another editor (whose name escapes me) advocated many of the same phrasal verb edits indicated above. Fair warning: said editor and Tjo3ya got into a shouting match on a talk page (whose topic I don't recall) about whether Tjo3ya's catena contributions constituted WP:OR and WP:COI in the corresponding article. Said editor alleged Tjo3ya had committed similar infractions pushing catena WP:FRINGE in other articles, including phrasal verb. I consequently glossed the mentioned articles and concluded the allegations probably hold water since the majority of Tjo3ya's relevant contributions lack any cites whatsoever, regardless of the article where the catena blather occurs. My reaction, as usual: let sleeping dogs lie re the articles; save my rants for the talk pages in hopes to conscript others to fight the good fight. In summary: that What's-his-or-her-name editor also favors redacting the phrasal verbs article and would likely comprise a 3:1 consensus. I suspect Mathglot would make it 4:1, but who's to say? --Kent Dominic·(talk) 14:59, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Request on 20:06:14, 8 February 2022 for assistance on AfC submission by Neurophon

• Neurophon (talk · contribs)
  • Draft:Richard Wiese (linguist) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Thank you for attending to my article on "Richard Wiese (linguist)". My impression from reading the information on reliable sources was that the links given under „Authority Control“ (Orcid, etc.) provide additional sources, beyond that of Google Scholar. Would Researchgate be helpful as well? can provide other sources, such as this one: https://publons.com/researcher/2619469/richard-wiese/ I am happy to order the references … I am a newbie at Wikipedia editing, so forgive me for mistakes …

Neurophon (talk) 20:06, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

--@Neurophon: I am a little surprised here. I actually declined your article, not because I thought it inherently non-notable, but because the sourcing was not sufficient to demonstrate its notability. I rather thought you might do another couple of month's work on this and resubmit it. However Buidhe (talk · contribs), who is a very experienced editor that I respect, obviously saw that differently and resubmitted and accepted the draft after adding two reviews. The article is now in mainspace, but still is tagged as being insufficiently sourced, which indeed I think it is. Reviews can be good sources, but if you put them in the publications list as Buidhe has done, they only attest to the correctness of the bibliographical data. If you can find reviews that say Wiese is important, you can use them to establish notability of the whole article, and if you find some that contain biographical information, you can use them as in-line citations at relevant places. I am a professor myself, and I don't think I am notable in terms of Wikipedia's criteria, so I am a little strict here. I would really like to see press reports showing an impact outside academia. I have tagged Buidhe on this post - perhaps he has more to say.

By the way, are you personally connected to Richard Wiese in any way? If so, you ought to declare that. --Doric Loon (talk) 20:33, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

And I should have checked before I wrote that: you have already declared that you are Richard Wiese yourself. That's OK, but I would advise you perhaps to step back from the article about yourself and let other people do whatever they think appropriate with it. Meanwhile, we are absolutely delighted to have someone of your calibre here on Wikipedia. I think you could make a great contribution to many articles on linguistics - I could suggest a few that are in a sorry state! --Doric Loon (talk) 20:39, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi Doric, if there are three in-depth reviews of Wiese's work that is at minimum very close to meeting GNG, and I did not do a thorough search so I expect there are more. There is no need for press reports showing an impact outside academia. You don't need to show an impact outside the field; to my knowledge, there's nothing about that in any notability policy or guideline. (t · c) buidhe 21:03, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

According to the AfC rules, "Articles that will probably survive a listing at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion should be accepted." So if you think the topic is probably notable, it should be accepted even if the referencing is not great. (t · c) buidhe 21:06, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@Buidhe: thanks for that explanation - I wasn't aware that academic book reviews carried that much power as notability indicators. --Doric Loon (talk) 23:00, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

WP:AFC Helper News

Hello! I wanted to drop a quick note for all of our AFC participants; nothing huge and fancy like a newsletter, but a few points of interest.

• AFCH will now show live previews of the comment to be left on a decline.
• The template {{db-afc-move}} has been created - this template is similar to {{db-move}} when there is a redirect in the way of an acceptance, but specifically tells the patrolling admin to let you (the draft reviewer) take care of the actual move.

Short and sweet, but there's always more to discuss at WT:AFC. Stop on by, maybe review a draft on the way? Whether you're one of our top reviewers, or haven't reviewed in a while, I want to thank you for helping out in the past and in the future. Cheers, Primefac, via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:59, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

Jans der Enikel

I know you're not the GA Nominator but I have started a GA Review of this article and you are mentioned in the GA Nomination as an expert on Jans der Enikel. Feel free to respond at Talk:Jans der Enikel/GA1 to my statements on the GA criteria. Shearonink (talk) 16:18, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm kind of unofficial co-nominator, I think, so thanks for the heads-up.--Doric Loon (talk) 08:20, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the offer of the pdf but that isn't necessary - it was just a comment that the material sounded interesting. Shearonink (talk) 16:48, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

Congrats, it's a...

	GA!
	Yay for Jans der Enikel, who knew all about "Pope Joan"... Shearonink (talk) 20:48, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks to Shearonink for reviewing this so diligently and with a close eye to detail. Much appreciated.--Doric Loon (talk) 08:24, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

Draft:Disney Wish

Hello, I would like to have your opinion on Draft:Disney Wish, along with anything else the draft may need before its submission to the mainspace. Cardei012597 (talk) 22:47, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

Hi, Cardei012597, you have done a lot of work on this, and I think it is ready. I will have to check whether we are allowed to publish this now, or whether we have to wait until July. If we put it up now, some details will have to be marked as provisional - we can't give the date of maiden voyage as definite if it hasn't happened. But it reads very well. I've made a couple of very minor edits. Doric Loon (talk) 11:07, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Thank you. Cardei012597 (talk) 16:46, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

DYK for Jans der Enikel

On 19 March 2022, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Jans der Enikel, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that the 13th-century Austrian chronicler Jans der Enikel characterized Richard the Lionheart as a "noble goose-roaster"? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Jans der Enikel. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, Jans der Enikel), and if they received a combined total of at least 416.7 views per hour (i.e., 5,000 views in 12 hours or 10,000 in 24), the hook may be added to the statistics page. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

 — Amakuru (talk) 12:03, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Belloch

There's only on article whose title includes 'Belloch'. Wouldn't it make more sense to simply redirect Belloch to Juan Alberto Belloch? The former redirect to List of Indiana Jones characters was simply a spelling error (Belloq). Leschnei (talk) 11:47, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

OK. --Doric Loon (talk) 12:24, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

Re Adjective reversion

I was grinning the entire time I reverted your "Whisky galore" example because:

1. I like your example in and of itself.
2. It was an occasion to reacquaint myself with the British spelling of whiskey.
3. Maybe it was a chance for you to see how we Americans favor the adjective around to the British about.

But seriously, if you want change what I restored, you might want to expand the pertinent section so that it's clear how certain adjectives like galore and ago are – in Modern English, anyway – used only on a postpositive basis. Personally, I get a chuckle at how dictionaries tag a given sense of words like outside as an adjective to account for something like, "the weather outside is frightful," yet they don't do the same for the sense of a word like beyond to account for stuff like, "we visited India and places beyond." Go figure. Anyway, nice 2 c u again. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 17:37, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

Oh, I'm too old to re-revert anything. If you don't know it, acquaint yourself not only with the spelling but also with the book: Whisky Galore. --Doric Loon (talk) 17:35, 23 April 2022 (UTC)

I was vaguely familiar with the movie. Never otherwise encountered "galore" in everyday speech. My lament: dictionaries typically don't highlight adjectives that are solely used on a postpositive basis.

So, are you going to have pity on the poor ESL students and expand the Adjective article as I mentioned? Otherwise, they'll continue looking up adjectives like galore, ago, and else only to construct sentences like –

• It must have been else someone.
• The package came earlier days than expected.
• I took a back step.
• It happened three ago weeks.

Indeed, galore is tagged as postpositive in both Merriam-Webster and Oxford, but not so re ago and else. If you want to split hairs, try analyzing "He was seated motionlessly" (ADVERB; formal) versus "He was seated motionless" ADJECTIVE; colloquial). I'll buy you coffee for life if you can find any WP:RELIABLESOURCE that's defined motionless as an adverb. My analysis? it's a case of an asyndetic adjective, i.e., a case of asyndeton that equates to "He was seated (and) motionless." Admittedly, a discussion of asyndetic adjectives is not ripe for Wikipedia articles but I had to invent it to explain instances such as the one above. Cheers. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 18:41, 23 April 2022 (UTC)

P.S. Why does it sound okay to say either, "I took a backward step" or "...a step backward" or "...a step back" but not "...a back step?" Why "have a look around" but not "an around look"? When non-native English speakers ask me such questions, my standard reply is that nobody knows; it's simply a matter of common usage. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 18:41, 23 April 2022 (UTC)

Hi. Fascinating questions. And what we have to say if we are honest is that language doesn't follow rules; rules follow language. Why something is done a certain way is a question of familiarity and collocation, and rules exist post ex facto to help us define and imitate what we are observing.

My two-volume Shorter OED (1983 edition) does say that when ago is an adjective it follows its noun.

In "He was seated motionless", I would see motionless as an adverb, and actually I think it is MORE formal and poetic than "He was seated motionlessly". I probably won't get that coffee because you won't be satisfied unless I find a source for your exact example, but for me it is exactly parallel to "He was sitting still", and my OED gives that an example of as still being used as an adverb. What makes you think motionless is an adjective? Just because the -ly is missing? Adverbs often don't have the -ly, and we often call these zero adverbs.

In "I took a step backward" or "...a step back" I understand these as adverbs, defining the direction of the "taking". In "I took a backward step", however, backward is an adjective describing the step. The reason it is not possible to say *"I took a back step" is that "back" as an adjective wouldn't mean anything here. I expect you won't like that analysis, but it works for the students. Doric Loon (talk) 12:16, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

Just a couple of protracted thoughts...

If we deem motionless to be an adverb in "He was sitting motionless, how do we reply to those who question the semantic difference between that and motionlessly? I'm loathe to say that variant inflections are semantically identical. My take: In "He was seated motionless," the salient meaning is that he was motionless (ADJECTIVE) such that he was seated (PARTICPLE) is incidental and thus adjunctive. In "He was seated motionlessly," the salient meaning is that he was seated such that motionlessly is incidental and thus adjunctive. Construing "He was seated motionless" as "He was seated (and) motionless" [with "and" as a zero conjunction plus "motionless" as an asyndetic adjective] is my conceit to the conclusion that motionless is always an adjective. So far, the dictionaries are with me. For my tastes, to construe it as an adverb is like arguing "3+6=9 except it is more formal and poetic to say 3x3=9." Ha! In my book, changing the factors (*ahem* words) OR changing the operation (*ahem* syntax) changes the essence of the equation.

Somewhat analogously, I construe "I feel bad" entirely apart from "I feel badly," and I maintain those two utterances depend on whatever's intended despite how some folks argue are semantically identical and other folks contend the latter is grammatically suspect. Likewise in contention: the unambiguous "I'm good" (ADJECTIVE versus the polysemic "I'm well" (ADJECIVE/ADVERB), the latter of which I never use and flip a coin as to its intended meaning whenever I hear it used. Are you well meaning healthy? Wealthy? Comfortably adapted to today's weather? Or is your status of being well off?

As for ago, the online OED tags it solely as an adverb; Merriam-Webster has no idea what it is, so it's tagged there as "adjective or adverb". No kidding. In my book, ago is a plain and simple adjective. It's never an adverb, at least not in Modern English. Just like two is never an adverb and days is never an adverb. Yet, those words regularly function adverbially in an utterance like, "They arrived two days ago" wherein two is a determiner and days is a noun and ago is a postpositive adjective. You have to go back 600 years to construe ago as an adverb when people said stuff like, "Arrived a gone two days did my lord from the hinterlands." Yep, "a gone" morphed into "ago" in the 16th century and switched from being a prepositive adverb to a postpositive adjective when the whole VSO to SVO change took place. Sad, but true: I have few better things to do than to track down such trivia.

For me, however, this isn't all purely academic. Student's have asked practical questions in the alternative like, "Why do you say, 'I'll be there Friday" when Friday isn't an adverb? Shouldn't it be, 'I'll be there on Friday'?" My new answer: According to Doric Loon, Friday is an adverb; it's just not tagged that way in the dictionaries. Double-ha! Cheers. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 23:01, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

Och, you do know how to pack so many interesting points into a message that I can't possibly answer them all. But I'll start at the end: in British English we do say "I'll be there on Friday", so the problem of how to analyze it if you omit the "on" is for Americans to struggle with. Calling it an adverb is not THAT absurd, but I'm not sure it is helpful. It might be more helpful to move away from parts of speech and think of constituent phrases, in which case "(on) Friday" is definitely an adverbial phrase: it's syntactically parallel to "I'll see you soon".

I can understand why you might see "motionless" as an asyndetic adjective - I personally would use a comma if I were conceptualizing it that way ("He sat there, motionless, ...") but that seems to me to be linked to intonation: the question is whether you are linking the word conceptionally to the preceding noun or to the preceeding verb, and I think you would hear the difference in intonation between the two. I have had similar thoughts in the past. In "He opened his mouth wide", is wide an adjective (the mouth is now wide) or an adverb (wide is how he opened it)? The grammar books say it is an adverb, and I have come to the conclusion that saying it is a zero adverb is the best way to present it to my students. I do find a lot of wisdom in the experience of generations of teachers who have tried different approaches and found that this explanation helps best. But it is ok to tell your students that there can be different ways of analyzing the same sentence - in fact it would do them a disservice if you don't say that.

As far as the form is concerned, the language allows variations. I would never say "I'm good" (unless I'm making an ethical claim about myself) but when I hear it I know it is your American way of saying "I'm well" (which is not ambiguous - it only refers to health in my English). Both are adjectives. I also hear Americans saying "I'm doing good" where I would say "I'm doing well" (that could refer to wealth or succcess), and both are adverbs. Old prescriptive grammar deprecated "doing good", but they are just variants. I personally would never use "motionlessly", so possibly that is also a regional variation. At any rate, there doesn't have to be much semantic difference between a sentence with a zero adverb and one with an equivalent -ly adverb.

Personally, I think "ago" is an aposition. The equivalent word in any other language I have learned is a preposition, and the only reason "ago" seems different is that it comes after the noun. It is clearly not a mainstream adverb, but of course, "adverb" is the traditional dustbin category - if you don't know what to do with a word you stick it in there, and if you have definde the category "adverb" to allow that, then that's OK.

What better thing could anyone have to do but track down linguistic trivia?

Seriously, if your main concern is really what you should say to your students (rather than what makes a fun debate between two linguistic nerds like you and me), then I would suggest you stop introducing terms like "asyndetic", which most people have to look up: in fact avoid any new terminology, because whatever its merits, the unfamiliarity is always a bigger demerit. I would also suggest you teach your students to shrug their shoulders a bit - it doesn't matter what part of speech "ago" is, it only matters that you can use it. Native speakers process the productive parts of their language according to rules, but the fossilized parts are reproduced as whole phrases, collocations, groups of words that "just are", and the reason is more likely to be historical than anything to do with today's constructions. Doric Loon (talk) 08:29, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

Adjectives and adverbs and compounds, oh my!

(Warning: What follows is a long-winded preface to a concise suggestion re the adjective article.)

One of my best friends once said, “If there’s a way to split a semantic hair, Kent will split it at least three ways.” That’s an apt characterization of my approach. Here’s one example...

My daily occupation involves a minimum of 12 hours spent defining stuff in a manner that entails both the sense of a given word, phrase, or clause together with its lexical category. As part of that, I’ve vacillated for the past year re attaching a proper lexical category to “slow-moving” in the sentence, “Bayou Teche is a 125-mile waterway with brackish marshes, wetlands, and slow-moving streams.” Some considerations:

• The streams are slow
• The streams are moving
• The streams are moving slowly

Changing the pertinent phrase to slowly moving streams isn’t an option. My main dilemma: in this instance of slow-moving, is “slow” an adverb that characterizes “moving” or is it an adjective that is compounded with “moving” but nonetheless characterizes “streams”? I worked it out as follows:

> slow-moving is a hyphenated compound (What kind?)

> slow-moving is a hyphenated adjectival compound (Comprised of what?)

> (1) slow is an adverb that characterizes moving; (2) moving is an adjectival continuative participle (i.e., my work substitutes continuative participle as a protologism for present participle); slow does NOT adjectivally characterize streams in the independent manner of slow streams or slow, moving streams.

HINT: In my lexicon, an adjectival compound relates to compound that functions adjectivally but isn't necessarily composed with any adjective. Look up "use-by date" in OED and you'll find it's tagged as a noun (despite how I'd call it a noun phrase). Look up "use-by" and you won't find it anywhere. In my lexicon, use-by is a hyphenated adjectival compound comprising the verb use in its imperative sense, and by as a preposition complemented by "date", with no adjective involved.

In my picky-picky way of analysis, I cringe each time I read the adjective page and find stuff like:

"[An adjective] forms part of the (compound) noun (e.g., rocking chair, hunting cabin, passenger car, book cover)" 

Huh? I categorically distinguish adjective from adjectival, so, if you ask me:

• rocking and hunting are adjectival continuative participles, not adjectives
• passenger and book are attributive nouns, not adjectives
• "(compound) noun" is contextually equivocal; the proper term should be noun phrase

My suggestion: someone who knows his stuff AND who has no WP:COI should make appropriate changes considering all of the above. Personally, I could never face myself to change the article accordingly since I’d have to use traditional terms (rather than the protologistic but immediately identifiable stuff shown herein as red text) that have ever-vexing limitations. Good luck to you if you’re up to the task! Cheers. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 19:03, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

Re prepositional adverb

What to do about this article? Laugh? Cry? Call in a bomb scare? Just let it be and hope it spontaneously disappears? --Kent Dominic·(talk) 08:39, 5 May 2022 (UTC)

@Kent Dominic Oh I can tell you what to do about this article. Propose it for deletion! This is not a thing. I'll do the PROD right away, and would be delighted if you back me up on it. Doric Loon (talk) 10:22, 5 May 2022 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Editor's Barnstar
	Re your contributions to phrasal verb. Kent Dominic·(talk) 15:24, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

@Kent Dominic Thanks so much. Though you did as much as I did. I really think we've made a difference there today, though it is not finished. I liked all your minor improvements to my wording, by the way.

Do remember to weigh in at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Prepositional adverb, by the way. Doric Loon (talk) 15:28, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

Welcome. I'm pleased with the improvements but not so satisfied with my own edit to the lede, per my comments on the article's talk page. And I just now saw and followed up on the AfD thing. Now I'm off to see if "follow up on" occurs anywhere as a phrasal verb. Silly me. Kent Dominic·(talk) 15:37, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

P.S. I didn't take into account who had edited what as I went through the article. Personalities and stake-holding don't factor into my edits. The only times I'm consciously aware of it: my attempted edits get bounced back due to an intervening edit that generates a you are attempting to edit an old version warning. Cheers, and please do edit whatever nonsense I might post in an article but feel free to ignore whatever rates as crap that I might post on the talk pages. Kent Dominic·(talk) 15:56, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

Phrasal verb hangover

A point of contention that I have no interest in fixing: the sentence that reads, "A simple diagnostic distinguishes between a prepositional verb and the inseparable phrasal verb." In my book, (1) phrasal verbs are – not by definition but by implication – categorically inseparable, and (2) the term, prepositional verb, has no cogent value. More specifically, in my lexicon:

• A phrasal verb (i.e., defined as a verb + collocated adverbial particle, and where collocated is defined as juxtaposed, e.g., put off) loses its identity as a phrasal verb if interposed by a transitive object such that put it off is a verb phrase – and a transitive verb phrase at that – wherein off is still a particle (i.e., NOT an adverb) but has an attenuated nexus to put.
  

IMHO, it's a cleaner way to explain the role of off in a sentence like, "Let's put the whole stupid idea off" or, in a more extreme variation, "Let's put the whole stupid idea they proposed yesterday off." Honest to God: Students who know corpus linguistics are rightly concerned whether "idea off" or "yesterday off" has any collocated adjectival meaning, and they're shocked to learn that native English speakers often use attenuations of the grammars taught along the naive-versus-pedantic continuum of textbook grammars.

• The term, prepositional verb, occurs only once in my book and is defined as follows:

prepositional verb
grammar – a 20th century taxon intended to classify:
1. an intransitive verb that entails a postpositive prepositional collocation.
2. a transitive verb that entails a postpositive prepositional collocation.
Cf. adverbial prepositional phrase.

Long story short, I can't read the phrasal verb article without rolling my eyes. Yet, I resist being characterized as an ideologue because I recognize the value in well-meaning efforts to explain what traditional grammars cannot reconcile among far-flung definitions and theoretical approaches. Particle verb? The term is useless for me, but the term exists, and it has some utility in extremely narrow attempts at explaining stuff. Yet, in my lexicon, it occurs only once and is defined as follows:

particle verb
grammar – a 20th century taxon intended to classify:
1. an intransitive phrasal verb that comprises an intransitive verb form together with a collocated adverbial particle.
2. a transitive phrasal verb that comprises a transitive verb form together with a collocated adverbial particle.
Cf. phrasal verb.

phrasal verb
1. a transitive verb that entails a collocated adverbial particle; Examples: (a) Édouard stood sifting through papers; (b) Deborah gathered up her briefcase, backpack, and phone; (c) The two Hangul documents were spread out.
2. an intransitive verb that entails a collocated adverbial particle; Examples: (a) Deborah looked on as T.S. washed the dishes; (b) Roger had taken off from Albany at 9:30 a.m.; (c) Judge Prosser started to enter but stopped short.

Extra credit: You might have noticed that some of the examples include participles rather than verbs. I've got that dynamic covered in adjacent parts of my lexicon but, since the distinction wasn't explicit in the phrasal verb article here, I thought an edit was in order.

Finally, I put no stock into claims such as "These semantic units ordinarily cannot be understood based upon the meanings of the individual parts alone but must be considered as a whole" despite my editing the sentence rather than deleting it. Ha! Anyone who knows a fair number of meanings re "go" and "ahead" can construe that its collocation means "yes" in certain contexts and "proceed in a forward direction" in others. In my view, the article needs clarification that idiomaticity re phrasal verbs is in the eye of the beholder, and that phrasal verbs really are nothing more than a syntactical construct. Meaning, you can't find "sift through" or "read off" or "back over" (e.g., "She ran the truck over her ex, changed gears, and then backed over him again") as a phrasal verb in any dictionary, but they're phrasal nonetheless.

Anyway, cheers. Time for us to get some real work done. Shame on you if you read this rant as carefully as I tried to write it. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 20:18, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

@Kent Dominic Haha!

I am also still not happy with the lead, or with some of the bits further down, but I want to come back to it fresh and read it all again. But we're making small steps forward.

I keep forgetting that when you say "in my book" you don't mean "in my opinion" - you really have a book. You need to get it published, and then we can cite it without it being OR. Doric Loon (talk) 20:28, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

Here's the catch: If anyone applies the definitions in my paradigm to the linguistics content here, an article like phrasal verb will have to be re-worked to include SOME to-infinitive phrases. (I.e., "to boldly go" is a verb phrase, not a phrasal verb, but a to-infinitive phrase nonetheless.) I didn't intend that consequence at the outset; I just started from simple axiomatic statements and worked my way up. Just think about it: in "something's got to give", to is a particle and give is a verb. So, viola! I will sic the linguistic dogs on anyone who calls it a particle verb. ~ Kent Dominic·(talk) 20:46, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

Re coordinating conjunctions and correlative conjunctions

If you check the cites I just posted in Conjunction_(grammar)#Etymology, you'll see the trends re the recently diminishing use of the terms coordinating conjunction and correlative conjunction. Questions –

1. Do you know of any terms that have been supplanting them, and that might be proper additions to the Conjunction (grammar) article?
2. Do you have any concrete evidence for citing the reason re the abovementioned trend in diminished use?

I have my own theories (mainly, that coordinating conjunction and correlative conjunction are cross-linguistic and interlingual nightmares) that aren't ripe for Wikipedia. In my own lexicon, I shun the terms in favor of protologistic stuff that similarly isn't ripe for Wikipedia. Cheers.--Kent Dominic·(talk) 17:09, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

Fun question. I am not aware of any alternative terminology, and wonder if the decline is simply because this is not a thing we need to talk about. Your "interlingual" reference may be to the point: the distinction between co-ordinating conjunctions and subordinating conjunctions is one I learned in my first year of school German, and there you need it because German has two kinds of clauses with strikingly different word order, so you have to know which of the two you are using. We say that "und" is a co-ordinating conjunction because it links two main clauses, whereas "weil" is a subordinating conjunction because it introduces a subordinate clause. I don't know if you know German, so I'll give you an example. Notice the square brackets showing what we group together, and watch the position of the verbs (in bold):

[Ich bin glücklich] und [du bist glücklich.]

I am happy and you are happy.

[Ich bin glücklich,] [weil du glücklich bist.]

I am happy because you are happy.

Aw, ain't that sweet! The theory is that "weil" is part of the subordinate clause, which means that the clause cannot stand by itself as it is not a whole sentence, whereas "und" stands between two clauses, both of which could be sentences in their own right. That's also reflected in the different use of the comma. This is a good and useful approach because it is the easiest way to teach the way the verbs move about. But in English, I really don't see a difference. If you start by saying the conjunction is part of the following clause, you must conclude that this clause by itself would be incomplete because the conjunction wouldn't be joining anything - but that's rather a circular argument unless there is something concrete like the German verb position that marks a real difference. So for English I would say, forget it. Doric Loon (talk) 18:23, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. I don't know German syntax, so your discussion of it is enlightening. I appreciate how you don't see a difference between the two types of conjunctions in English but, IMHO, traditional definitions for those items overlap in a way that irredeemably conflate the intended distinctions. My approach: two sets of conjunctions termed incipital (e.g., "Since it's late, I'm off to bed") and interstitial (e.g., "I'm off to bed since it's late"). Those terms can be collocated as an incipital adjectival conjunction (e.g., "Although he couldn't speak German, Kent tried his best"), as an interstitial concessive conjunction (e.g., Kent couldn't speak German but he tried his best"), etc., with nine variants.

My main complaint with traditional grammar: Too many people use coordinating conjunction in tandem with subordinate clause to differentiate the identity of a so-called main clause. I'd be rich if I had a dollar for each time a student asked me why – in a sentence such as "I take it for granted that you'll be there" – the "I take it for granted" part constitutes a main clause while "you'll be there is somehow" subordinate (i.e., construing main and subordinate in their generic meanings rather than as grammatical terms of art).

My solution: "you'll be there", despite being dependent (or imbedded, or matrix, or however else linguists try to characterize it) becomes, in my lexicon, the propositional clause while other clauses in a complex sentence are introduced by an incipital or interstitial conjunction (and thus adverbial or adjectival) or introduced by an aggregating conjunction (e.g., and; plus, etc.), a concessive conjunction (e.g., but, while, although, etc.) a disjunction (e.g., or, unless, etc.).

Unfortunately for people who derive earnings from a linguistics occupation and livelihood, maggots like yours truly have time to rethink traditional terminology that has outlived its usefulness and never quite made sense in the overall phalanx of grammatical terms. Eight hundred and ninety-two 'original and/or uniquely defined grammar terms later, I'm very nearly done. Kent Dominic·(talk) 21:34, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

My approach to terminology is 1. is it helpful? and 2. is it familiar? Whether it is logical is a pale third. For German, a simple two-fold distinction is necessary, and it doesn't matter much what you call it, so "main" and "subordinate" works as well as anything. I don't see why your students need to make a distinction, though. Doric Loon (talk) 11:42, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

My approach mirrors yours. Yet, under "is it helpful" comes 1a. "does it comport with the ordinary meaning the of lemmas involved?" I never thought twice about terms like main clause or main verb until ESL students expressed difficulty construing "I think that..." as having a main quality in a sentence like, "I think that, of all the people in the world, Doric Loon is the most sensible human being." So, "The clause re Doric Loon is somehow subordinate?" is what they tend to ask.

Similarly, the language institute where I used to work deemed stative verbs, participles, infinitives, and past tense verbs to be the main verbs in relevant verb phrases, and students were required to use a "full sentence" in their replies. "Did you complete your homework?" required a reply of "Yes, I completed it" rather than "Yes, I did." Students regularly complained that native speakers regularly use what you and I know to be an answer ellipsis, so why wouldn't "Yes, I did" qualify as a full sentence?

So, my concerns don't at all relate to people who have no reason to ponder names for grammatical terms that are irrelevant to our everyday language uses. And I admit that I had no good answer the first time a student asked me, "Why is it called a present participle if it's the main verb in a past tense sentence like, 'She was working yesterday'"? Short answer: It's just a term; memorize it and deal with it. I loathed such explanations when I was a student, so I was remiss to offer it as an explanation as an English instructor.

Truly, I never wondered about terminological stuff before teaching ESL. Now I'm driven to track down arcane answers to such questions so that, if nothing else, I can more adequately explain the hodge-podge approach to inventing grammatical terms that have become 1. marginally helpful for those of us who make instant associations based on our elementary school days' indoctrination; 2. somewhat familiar to native English speakers who give the terms a second thought after their own school days, and 3. wholly illogical in the large scheme of things.

Question: How helpful are such terms when instructors and students alike mix them up, same as with nonrestrictive relative clause versus restrictive relative clause?

Another day, another rant. Sorry. Long and short of this post: I know approximately when the coordinating conjunction and correlating conjunction terms came about, but I don't know by whom. I can only guess why those terms are falling out of use, but I don't yet know of any replacement terms other than those that I use in my taxonomical scheme. Cheers. Kent Dominic·(talk) 14:50, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Suburbs

[1]

Here in Australia, one speaks of a large metropolitan area as being composed of suburbs, e.g. the Melbourne central business district is a suburb, surrounded by "inner suburbs" like South Melbourne. It's very different from the US meaning of "outside the city". I see you're interested in Scotland; if Scotland used our terminology, you'd use "suburb" to refer to places like Laurieston, Glasgow or New Town, Edinburgh. Because this is not a geo-specific article, it's better to use a term like "environs" with the same meaning worldwide than a term like "suburb" whose meaning in some countries can be almost the opposite of its meaning in other countries. 49.198.51.54 (talk) 21:27, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

OK. Well, how about "outskirts"? I find "environs" a rather unusual word for this sentence. Doric Loon (talk) 11:30, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

Your draft article, Draft:Burg Blessem

Hello, Doric Loon. It has been over six months since you last edited the Articles for Creation submission or Draft page you started, "Burg Blessem".

In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material deemed unsuitable for the encyclopedia mainspace, the draft has been deleted. If you plan on working on it further and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.

Thanks for your submission to Wikipedia, and happy editing. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 22:57, 18 June 2022 (UTC)

Yeh, thanks @Liz. Just over my head in other work, but I'll come back to it. Doric Loon (talk) 12:12, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

HB Antwerp

Hi Doric Loon, it's nice to meet you. I've been working on a draft for HB Antwerp, a diamond company based in Antwerp currently mentioned in the Sewelo article. A few of the sources are in Dutch, and I noticed that you are a fluent Dutch speaker, so thought you might be willing to take a look. Do you think it is ready to be included? Please note that I will be offline for a few days, so may be delayed in responding. Looking forward to your thoughts! Margxx (talk) 09:16, 29 July 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Margxx, welcome to Wikipedia. I'm afraid that when I look at this, I don't immediately feel too hopful. This article is about a small company (170 employees is very little in world terms) which has existed for only two years, so that it would take something extraordinary to give it notability in Wikipedia terms. The fact that you are an employee of the company is also an issue: it's good that you declared your COI honestly, and it would not be decisive if the material was clearly notable, but if that is in doubt, your COI will reinforce the suspicion that this is just an advert. So what you need is the company making big news. Now you do have references to it being mentioned in a couple of major newspapers, which is very helful, but it seems like the company is mentioned in passing in these. (I couldn't read them all because I don't have access to some of these newspapers.) For example, one article is an interview with Mr Papismedov, and the company is only mentioned to locate him in the industry. So my feeling is probably that this would not pass an AfC (articles for creation) review. I think a more helpful way for you to proceed at present would be to work on the article on the Sewelo diamond, or on articles about the diamond industry generally, possibly create one about that new diamond tracking system that HB Antwerp is working on, and it would be appropriate to mention the company in those. (But be careful that you are actually adding more content, and not just gratuitously adding the company name to existing articles, or you will be pounced on for promotional editing!) Meanwhile, this draft is in your own userspace, so it can lie there indefinitely, and it may be that in time there will be more big stories to flesh it out. That's just my take, but of course it doesn't hurt to try for an AfC if you want. Let me know if you need help with that. Doric Loon (talk) 10:08, 31 July 2022 (UTC)

Doric Loon, thanks so much for taking the time to look at the draft. I see that most of the coverage is indeed hidden behind paywalls- would it be helpful if I were to send those to you, perhaps as PDFs via email?

I realize that the company is relatively small and still considered young, but to my eye does appear to meet WP:SIGCOV if international press is considered. In fact, my initial draft included additional information, but following feedback from several editors I stripped it down to highlight only the prominent publications without distraction. Even the articles which don't focus primarily on HB Antwerp discuss it in some depth, as opposed to trivial mentions. If the company were to be closed down tomorrow, it would still be notable due to the coverage it received as a result of its closed-circuit approach and work on two of the largest stones ever discovered, or am I misinterpreting WP:NTEMP? There is a fine line between proving notability and adding promotional content, and as a paid editor I erred on the side of caution, but perhaps the language in the article could be tweaked to better reflect the significance?

Looking forward to your thoughts, Margxx (talk) 08:56, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Margxx. Well, your last point does touch on a real quandry for paid editors. It might well help if you could get an experienced Wikipedia editor who is independent of the company to work with you. I won't offer to do that, because this is outwith my field. But I am sure there are editors whose past work on Wikipedia has shown expertise in this industry. Talk to them.

One tip: you are right to include as many sources as possible to show the breadth and strength of the company's impact. However, the danger there is that many of them will inevitably only mention the company in passing, and therefore be weak sources, and a reviewer will not take the time to read thirty sources. What you can do when you put this in for AfC review is to put a note at the top saying what your three best sources for notability are. (This is a note to the reviewers, not something to go in the article: once you have submitted an AfC, you will see there is an option for adding comments at the top.) Make sure these are not behind firewalls, and that they talk about the company itself, not just one of its employees.

I am assuming you have already read a bit about AfC? If not, see Wikipedia:Articles for creation. But I expect that is how you found me in the first place. Doric Loon (talk) 12:09, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

Doric Loon, thanks so much for your input. I really appreciate it. Margxx (talk) 09:00, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Request on 00:35:44, 21 September 2022 for assistance on AfC submission by Terrisays

• Terrisays (talk · contribs)
  • Draft:Aqua Sport Sea Skimmer (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Terrisays (talk) 00:35, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for you input on my sea skimmer article. i just got the revised / improved version approved [[2]] It includes information declassified from government sources (FOIAs) on the military uses for the governments uses. Thank you for your positive comments and encouragement. Terrisays (talk) 00:35, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Terrisays, congratulations! I'm delighted to hear it. Well done on persevering. I hope you will continue to make great contributions to Wikipedia. Doric Loon (talk) 17:35, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of File:Alice Greczyn, Wayward (Cover).jpg

The file File:Alice Greczyn, Wayward (Cover).jpg has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Non-free book cover being used in a WP:DECORATIVE manner in Alice Greczyn#Dare to Doubt. Non-free book cover art is generally allowed to be used for primary identification purposes in a stand-alone article about the book its represents, but its use in other articles is generally only allowed when the cover art itself is the subject of sourced critical commentary as explained in WP:NFC#cite_note-3 and the context for non-free use required by WP:NFCC#8 is evident. There is no such commentary for this book cover anywhere in the article, which means there's no valid justification for the cover's non-free use in said article.

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated files}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the file's talk page.

Please consider addressing the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated files}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and files for discussion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. -- Marchjuly (talk) 01:18, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Marchjuly, thanks for the heads-up. I don't deal so often with images, so I wasn't aware of this policy. Is it possible to argue for primary identification purposes in an article section, when the book itself is notable? This article is still under development, but I was planning to make "Wayward" the section heading as it is the most important part of this section, and discuss critical commentary on the book. I think we could make a claim of notability if we wanted a stand-alone article, but splitting up the article wouldn't really help the reader. If something along these lines is possible, I would ask you to hold off for while to let me do all that. But we are not going to be discussing the cover art. Doric Loon (talk) 15:49, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

Non-free book cover art is generally allowed when it's used for primary identification purposes in stand-alone articles about books, but not so much in other cases. This acknowledges that a book's cover art itself is typically the way a book is identified, but it's also assumed that any sourced critical commentary about the book's cover art (not the book, but it's cover art) or it's branding/marketing would already be found in such an article or could be eventually added to such an article. So, if you feel the book is notable and satisfies WP:NBOOK, you could create a stand-alone article about it, use the cover art there and then add some summary information (even a WP:HATNOTE) about the book (sans its cover art) to a section in the author's article. The other approach you're advocating might be possible, but I don't think you'd be able to establish a consensus to use the cover art in such a way. Moreover, at some point if the book truly turns out to be notable in its own right, someone else could WP:SPLIT to content about it from the author's article and create a separate article about book.

Finally, you used the word "we" a couple of times in your post. Are perhaps working with others in creating or editing content about Greczyn? Are you perhaps editing on her behalf? Perhaps "we" has no special meaning attached to it, but you used it for some reason and I'm just curious as to why. -- Marchjuly (talk) 04:44, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Marchjuly, thanks for the advice. It's not critical: if the image is deleted I can reintroduce it later if the situation changes. I probably ought to spend some time getting into the images side of Wikipedia, but meanwhile I'm happy for you to do whatever follows best practice.

I hadn't even noticed that I'd used "we". I am not really working with anyone, but I'm not the only person who's edited the article and I alway prefer to think of the wikipedia community than of any individual ownership of articles, so I suppose that's what made me put it that way. Or maybe I meant you and me, to signal that now you have taken an interest I will seek consensus with you. Who knows what goes on in my subconscious: it's a strange and murky place.

But no, I certainly am not working with Greczyn - I am strongly opposed to any kind of influence by parties who are the subjects articles, paid or otherwise. Doric Loon (talk) 09:24, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

Just for reference, if the file ends up deleted, you can always request that it be restored via WP:REFUND. You will, however, be expected at that time to explain why the file should be restored, which in the case of non-free files generally means explaining how the way you want to use the file satisfies relevant policy. As for the "we", no big deal but you should maybe be a bit more careful in the future since it can sometimes be seen as an unintentional "admission" of some connection to the subject of the article. -- Marchjuly (talk) 09:31, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

Help, please

Long time no see. Hope all's well. A quick item: I think there's a Wikipedia article about the phenomonenon wherein an arguably problematic syntax is nonetheless widely acceptable when everday usage subsumes a supposed rule of grammar, e.g. "the data is (versus are) correct" or "who (versus whom) did you go with?" Do you know the title of the article? Or, if it's not an article, do you know the term for the phenomenon? Cheers. Kent Dominic·(talk) 00:30, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Kent Dominic, fun question. I don't know of a term, and I'm not sure I would want there to be an article. The examples you give are just bog standard language change.

I wonder, though, if you're not looking at this backwards. Surely what you are really concerned with is the toxic variety of linguistic prescription - people getting a bee in their bonnet about the language not doing what they think it should, and seeing perfectly normal language use as "problematic". It's those people's hypercorrect perception that is the phenomenon. Language does what it wants.

To take your first example, data is a Latin plural, but in English is a singular. If you know Latin, that might bother you. But if you don't know Arabic, it probably doesn't bother you that we use assassin as a singular, though that's an Arabic plural. Logically, if assassin can be singular, data can too. But you the way a person feels about them may be quite different, depending on their vantage point. It's those subjective feelings that you seem to be talking about. So if you want a term, how about "speaker prejudices"? Doric Loon (talk) 14:06, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for all that. I simply half-recall coming across an unfamiliar linguistics term, either a word or a phrase, that encapsulated all of this. I vaguely remember seeing the term here and associating it with an article, but it might have been a one-off term in an article. It's also quite possible that I saw the term elsewhere. One thing's for sure: I mistakenly thought I'd have no real use for the term but could easily revisit it if needed. Fickle memory. Kent Dominic·(talk) 16:17, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

For some context, see the long-winded discussion I instigated @Watercraft. It seems I'm the only editor who believes watercrafts is more appropriately used to signify a plural and collective sense of the word while watercraft more appropriately signifies its use as an unenumerable mass noun (or as a enumerable but singular noun, as the case may be). Two other editors seem to conflate the concept of collective noun and mass noun in their reliance on equivocal definitions for watercraft(s) in OED. My point: there's a notable difference between "Watercraft [mass noun] has [singular case] undergone numerous changes" versus "Watercrafts [collective noun] have [plural case] undergone numerous changes".

The conflicting editors seem to think that because OED and numerous cited sources allow "Watercraft [collective noun] has [singular case] undergone numerous changes", that it's somehow cromulent despite how a reader can't determine whether the watercraft referent is used in a mass or collective sense. (I.e., did the watercraft industry undergo changes en masse or did idividual boats and ships collectively undergo changes?) By contrast, I contend that usage is quite ambiguous and also dammit-I-wish-I-could-remember-the-term-for-problematic-syntax-that-is-nonetheless-widely-acceptable-when-everday-usage-subsumes-a-supposed-(and, in this case, useful-but-neither-widely-nor-readily understood) rule-of-grammar. Lesson learned: I am so, so much more productive in my own work when I avoid Wikipedia discussion page interaction. Kent Dominic·(talk) 17:07, 17 October 2022 (UTC)