User:Stee4257/sandbox

On Derivational Morphology

This article has not yet received a grade. I was not distracted while reading this article; however, there were two links (root word and base words) that did not lead to a working page, and a section (Productivity) that could probably use a citation. The article does appear to be (mostly) neutral and from reliable, neutral sources although the citation for the third source (Speech and Language Processing) appears to be missing some information. I think it would be useful to talk about morphological derivations outside of the Anglo-centric view presented, but the English examples themselves appear to be neutral. I was unable to look at a full four sources as this article only contains three in all. It does have some very useful links to other linguistics pages, but another source or two within the article probably wouldn’t be amiss. It does not appear that there is any plagiarism within the article (although I have seen a couple of assignments that use this Wikipedia article word for word without citation). I do think that other languages are underrepresented within the article; however, the article seems to be fairly balanced by topic.

I do think it’s interesting that someone suggested perspectives need to be distinguished within/at the onset of the article. I don’t know that I necessarily agree since I didn’t have any trouble discerning what the article was talking about, and it seemed broad enough to encompass multiple perspectives/view points, which I think a general overview of a topic should do. Then again, my stance could equally be contributed to my incomplete understanding of the topic at hand. I also like the idea of including derivation outside of morphology as another user suggests. I agree that derivational processes can (and do) exist outside of morphology; however, the article is called morphological derivation, so this addition of syntactic (or other) derivation seems unnecessary. 

One line of information that I would add to the article would be "As shown above, affixes attach as either suffixes or prefixes to change category or meaning of the word. In addition, multiple affixes can attach to a single base to derive a new lexeme, and these affixes attach in a particular order. For example, if we were to take the word 'unhappiness', we would see that this is the base word 'happy' plus a prefix and a suffix. However, in order to form 'unhappiness' the prefix un- must attach to happy before -ness, since -ness changes category as previously demonstrated, while un- maintains category but changes meaning of the base." I believe this particular addition is useful since it allows for more complex morphological derivation processes than are currently expressed within the page.