User talk:Ashleigh813/sandbox

Hi Ashleigh. What you've added looks good so far. I'm not sure: maybe you should remove the bibliography section if all the sources in it end up being in the reference section anyway? Also, I don't know what else you'll add to the compounds section, but so far they look like they're nouns, so, will there be other types of compounds too? Otherwise maybe just move it up with the nouns section. BlakeALee (talk) 07:21, 13 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, Ashleigh. Are there more examples of what distinguishes verbs from nouns, etc? Like verbs only take X morphology and nouns only take Y, or some syntactic differentiation perhaps. Looking good so far though. Do compositional compounds only exist for nouns? Is their nominalizing or verbalizing derivational morphology at all? Or does its nature as a synthetic language kind of nullify the usefulness of this terminology? Mnransdellgreen (talk) 07:30, 13 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Good point. You could say that verbs are distinguished by ability to take a classifier plus subject inflection. Gholton (talk) 21:06, 16 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hey Ashleigh, I didn’t really see any issues with the content of the paper, so I’m just going to give a few notes and make a few stylistic suggestions that I think could improve the article (I can give a more thorough review once you’re near your final draft).

There’s an issue with the right border of your consonant table

Are you going to put in vowels in the phonology section? Seems like if you’re going to have the consonants you should include vowels too.

This could just be something you plan to take care of later, but remember to change the - into an actual em dash – in "The Witsuwit'en verb consists of a lexical root and an aspectual, tense, or modal affix - most often a suffix"

Is it the Ethnologue or Ethnologue? Double check if you aren’t sure.

In “Several non-specialist sources (the First Peoples' Heritage Language and Culture Council, the British Columbia Ministry of Education, and the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology) “ If the sources you have in the parenthesis is not a complete list of all the sources you’re referring to then use e.g. at the beginning of the list – this makes it more specific/accurate and more formal

The use of semi-colons is subjective and controversial, but I think one important thing to keep in mind is that colons, semi-colons, and em-dashes are powerful punctuation marks that need to be used sparingly or else they will lose their power. Deft use of punctuation can also make the rest of your writing seem better.

That said, an example of what I consider to be unnecessary use of the semi-colon is “Verbal morpheme order is stable throughout the Athabaskan family; thus, the template of the Witstuwit'en verb is very similar to other Athabaskan languages”

What I think doesn’t have a semi-colon but should is between the following two sentences, because they are intimately related, and the full stop of a period is too extreme for this situation, whereas in the sentence above it isn't

“…except in the case of subject marking on the verb stems. There are another set of markers for subject marking on verb stems, distinct from other pronominal affixes.”

Really a good job though, and I think you know what needs to be added and adjusted Caitlyn3 (talk) 06:11, 14 February 2017 (UTC)Caitlyn3[reply]