User:Victor823/sandbox

Week 3 (Wikipedia Article Critique)

1. This article does not have a “grade”. The indicated importance of this article is not presented, but I can infer that the importance of this article is to inform readers about morphological derivation by presenting the readers with common derivational patterns and by contrasting it to what some may believe is derivation, but it is actually inflection.
2. This article does have two references and it cites once from each of those references. The citations on this article are not direct quotes from the source, because there is no quotations marks, but it seems as though the writer took his or her knowledge from these references and expressed it in his or her own words. Everything in the article seems to be relevant to the topic, morphological derivation”. Nothing distracted me from the topic.
3. The article is neutral and it doesn’t seem biased at all because the writer seems to be informative without adding biased opinions.
4. I believe the information in this article are the writer’s own words. I do see that there are two references cited that were used to construct this article. This writer seems to have only paraphrased and not directly quote these sources.
5. The viewpoint I feel was underrepresented is found under the “Derivation and inflection” subheading. When the example of homonyms, morphemes that have the same sound, but not the same meaning, is presented I feel the writer didn’t take the time to further elaborate on why these homonyms have different meanings. What leads me to this conclusion is that I am aware on how “er” in smaller and “er’ in cooker differ and feel like I can elaborate.  I will actually be using this lack of information on homonyms as my opportunity to add a few sentences I feel will improve the vagueness on this topic and the article overall.
6. There are two citations in this article, both of the references used come from a book, one comes from “The Penguin Dictionary of Language” the other reference is “Syntactic Analysis The Basics”. The penguin Dictionary of Language does not have a link which prevents me from seeing that source. “Syntactic Analysis The Basics” does have a link, but when I click on it, it doesn’t take me to the source, it takes me to a Wikipedia page that asks about ISBN numbers. With that being said I still don’t think that there is any close paraphrasing or plagiarism on this article because I get the sense that the writer is sharing his or her knowledge in his or her own words, but I am not certain because of the citation issues I mentioned above. There is also an "external link" that is provided at the very bottom of the article: http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsDerivation.htm
7. One issue that came up on this article’s talk page pointed out that this article does not mention Etymological derivation. I do agree with the contributor in that Etymological derivation is something that should have been touched on, because Etymological derivation is a derivational process and if a reader is inquiring about morphological derivation they may benefit from being presented Etymological derivation.

Week 5 (What I would add to this article)

I would add these sentences to the article “Morphological derivation” to the very end of the section that has the subheading “Derivational and inflection”.

When adding “er” to the adjective small the process this adjective goes through is inflectional rather than derivational. The reason why is because adjectives are inflected for the comparative and superlative.  In this example it is a comparative inflection because the suffix being used is  “-er” not “-est”, which would have made it a superlative inflection. When “er” is added to cook it goes through derivation not inflection because it changes the category of cook, which is a verb, to a noun. In this particular example “–er” gives the verb it attaches to the meaning of the doer of the action rather than simply being the action how it was initially in its verb form. This process is very productive because it can be added to verbs and nouns. ISBN 978-1-107-48015-5

Week 6 (Reflection)

I feel that my contribution is valuable because I was able to explain why is it that when adding “-er” to the adjective “small” it goes through an inflectional process. How the article stands right now it fails to mention the reasoning behind that, it only states that it is inflection, but lacks an explanation. With the information I added regarding inflection in adjectives for the comparative and superlative, I feel I have improved the article by adding information on why it is inflection and not derivation.  

It is the same case when the writer presents us with the fact that when adding “-er” to the verb “cook” it goes through the process of derivation. It lacks an explanation and I feel like I was able to explain why in this example derivation is the process the word “cook” goes through. I explained that the verb “cook” went on to be a noun by adding “-er” because it added the meaning of the doer of the action and that it was no longer just the action itself. All in all I feel that this information will improve the article because it provides a closer look on why these examples are inflection and derivation.