Talk:Catena (linguistics)

Vertical alignment
It seems that vertical alignment indicates headedness; this could be made clearer in the text of the article... AnonMoos (talk) 03:06, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

Syntactic trees
Hi Tjo3ya! Could you point me towards the software you used to create the syntactic trees you have annotated this article with? They are perfect. Thanks a


 * Hello, The trees were made with Flash. Flash is expensive, though, and I do not have it, but rather a colleague of mine has it and he produced the trees for this article and for numerous other articles in Wikipedia. I am at present using a different drawing program, Paint, to draw the trees. I think Paint is included as part of Microsoft Office, or it can be freely downloaded from the Net. Drawing with paint is laborious though, but the result can be quite good. I drew the trees in this article using Paint, and an hour ago, I just drew the trees for this article using Paint. Be aware that drawing such trees demands a good amount of time. --Tjo3ya (talk) 19:47, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Seizure by others

 * The catena concept was introduced to linguistics by William O'Grady in 1998 and has been seized upon by others

For the second half of this, sources are or evidence is "Osborne 2005, Osborne et al. 2011, Osborne and Groß 2012". This rather suggests that it's been seized upon by Timothy Osborne. Has it been seized upon by people independently of, or via, Osborne (and not just with him)?

(I had a quick look in Google Scholar, but alas Catena is a surname, so the answer cannot be found very easily.) -- Hoary (talk) 08:13, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Legitimacy of concept
Hoary,

Timothy Osborne and his collaborators are at present the prime movers and motivators behind the knowledge, interest, and spread of the catena concept. These linguists were not responsible for discovering the concept, however. William O'Grady did that. There are couple of points to be aware of in this area. The sources listed in this article do not exhaust the peer-reviewed publications that present and build on the catena concept. There are five to six more of them. What this means is that approximately 15 to 20 reviewers at high level journals have accepted and see value in the concept, and there are probably at least two dozen editors at these journals who now have knowledge of the concept and who deem it worthy of attention.

If you want to see a full list of the peer-reviewed publications that include the catena as a/the central concept, please make this desire known. I will happily list all of them here or elsewhere for you. I can make electronic copies available, if doubt remains. --Tjo3ya (talk) 17:05, 1 August 2012 (UTC)


 * I haven't doubted that the concept is legitimate (or article-worthy). I am familiar with the titles of the journals that are already cited. If they have published articles on catena, fair enough.


 * But as you know, there are various competing grammatical frameworks. (Perhaps "competing" should be in quotes, as in practice many students have little or no real choice among them. But in some places, at some times, they do compete.) Dependency grammar does not I think have one of the biggest market shares. Nothing wrong with that; and just as the awfulness of an article here about Coca-Cola should not deter anyone from writing a splendid one about Shasta Cola, it's good to see excellent coverage here of catena, and by one of the people best qualified to write it. However, this should avoid phrasing that might reasonably be interpreted as aggrandizing the subject or its influence. -- Hoary (talk) 03:37, 3 August 2012 (UTC)


 * Please provide examples where the text is "aggrandizing the subject or its influence". I will consider rewording those passages.


 * Not is aggrandizing, but could be read as aggrandizing. I'd change and has been seized upon by others to "and has been seized upon by Timothy Osborne and his collaborators". -- Hoary (talk) 12:58, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Accurate impression
Hoary,

I do not want to misrepresent the history and importance of the catena concept. But I also do not want to tie the concept too narrowly to one or two particular personalities, since I think that the concept's legitimacy extends beyond these personalities. I think the numerous reviewers and editors who have approved the papers for publication are now also invested in the concept (at least to some minor extent).

For these reasons, I have sought a compromise. I have changed "others" to "some other linguists", and I have expanded the two notes that cite the relevant literature. The reader who looks at the notes and/or at the literature list will see immediately that Timothy Osborne is the primary mover and motivator behind the catena concept. That fact is not hidden. --Tjo3ya (talk) 23:22, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Concur with Hoary
"I think the numerous reviewers and editors who have approved the papers for publication are now also invested in the concept (at least to some minor extent)." - I certainly hope that's true, but true or not isn't that speculation? A better standard for Wikipedia is published work. What other linguists besides yourself and your collaborators, have seized upon the catena concept? I, like Hoary, found that the narrow authorship in the references left me with an unfortunately negative impression of the author. Surely that's not the impression you want to make? Especially after all the great work you've put into all these linguistics articles?

Spike0xff (talk) 03:23, 25 May 2014 (UTC)


 * SpikeOxff,
 * What changes could be made to the article to alter your negative impression? The catena concept is still quite new. My coauthors and I continue to employ the concept in our works, so the list of publications is growing. I will add more relevant works as they are published. For instance, the concept now appears in two encyclopedia articles on dependency grammar (Routledge and HSK); the Routledge encyclopedia on syntax just appeared. At some point, I assume that others beyond me and my collaborators will see value in the concept and will begin to employ it as well.


 * Three things should be kept in mind: 1) I/we did not come up with the notion; the concept itself is due to William O'Grady. 2) I/we have no connection to William O'Grady (we're not his students, and I've never met him in person). 3) The catena concept is easily understood in dependency grammar (DG) framework, but the concept is less obvious in a constituency grammar framework. Thus the concept will spread as interest in DG spreads. DG is, however, still ignored by too many theoretical linguists (but not by the computational linguists). --Tjo3ya (talk) 16:03, 31 May 2014 (UTC)


 * But all of that is perhaps missing what is most important. Is there something in the article about the catena that seems inaccurate or demonstrably wrong? A negative impression of the author is a secondary concern; the idea itself (i.e. the catena) is primary.


 * SpikeOxff, I've added more literature about the catena. See the notes and the literature list in the article. Does the addition of sources authored by other linguists (other than me) help reduce your "negative impression of the author"? Please respond. --Tjo3ya (talk) 16:03, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

Link to DG
Hi Maunus,

I disagree with your most recent edit. The catena can be defined over constituency-based structures as well, which means that its applicability extends beyond DG to syntactic theory in general. Yes, awareness of the concept has come from DG, and it is most insightfully applicable to dependency-based structures. I state this because a referee on one of my articles (Osborne et al. 2013) emphasized that the catena unit is applicable to syntactic structures in general. We had a lengthy exchange about the issue. I think the introductory paragraph was more accurately formulated the way it was, where the connection to DG is clear, but the door is not closed to the extension of the notion beyond DG. I am now going to revert your edit. --Tjo3ya (talk) 15:35, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

One preposition too many ?
Hi. Me no linguist; I am not even a native speaker of English. So instead of editing I rather ask here : Isn't there one appearance too many of preposition in the sentence "The verb and the preposition that it demands preposition form a single meaning-bearing unit, whereby this unit is a catena." ? PS - this is about the first wikipedia article about something linguistic that I felt me as an amateur can actually learn something from. Thank you for your work. Pardon my German (Fiiiisch!) (talk) 13:20, 25 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Hello Fiiiisch,


 * Yes, you found a typo, which I have now corrected. Your English may be good enough to correct such typos yourself, when you find them. Concerning the articles I patrol, I check anything that others change, hence if you make an inaccurate correction, don't worry. I or someone else will ensure that the correction is good.


 * Concerning learning something about syntax (and linguistics) from Wikipedia articles, many linguists who pursue dependency grammar (DG) emphasize that the entire theoretical apparatus of DG is much easier to understand than for phrase structure grammars. This is due in part to the simple renditions of sentence structure associated with DG. The trees in the article here illustrate this point. The beginning linguist can quickly get a grasp on the DG tree diagrams, since they speak to intuition. --Tjo3ya (talk) 16:16, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

Hello Tim,

are all articles on Wikipedia supervised or patrolled or only selected ones? To know that all of them are would take away the burden of messing something up mistakenly or even out of ignorance. For none native speakers this will always be a concern... Mramosch (talk) 14:45, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

Definition
Initial definition:

"Any element (word or morph) or any combination of elements that are continuous in the vertical dimension (y-axis)"

is incomprehensible. You'd need to define what "continuous" and "y axis" mean in graph-theoretical terms before the main definition to make sense of it. I suspect "y axis" means dominance, and a "continuous" T something like

dominates(T,String) and leftmost(String,L) and rightmost(String,R) => dominates(T,W) for every L<=W<=R

but who knows.

--189.188.5.200 (talk) 14:27, 3 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Perhaps you might want to invest another 30 seconds to read a bit further. As it stands, this comment is a knee-jerk reaction. --Tjo3ya (talk) 14:55, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

Omit the element by itself
In the example about strings, catenae, etc..., they shoudl exclude out of he definition, "Any element." and also not list the elements, as where it says, "A B C D E F..". We already know the elements. It's just superfluous, I think.


 * The comment here is not understandable. I suggest expanding and explaining more what you mean. It would also be good to identify yourself, since doing so would mean that your comments could be taken more seriously.--Tjo3ya (talk) 04:34, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

End of article is truncated...
Did somebody accidentally cut off the end of the article?

Can somebody look up an older revision for the lost part? Haven’t found a way of accessing the history of the article.

Thanks! Mramosch (talk) 14:34, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

Possible WP:COI / WP:ADVOCACY issues
At the moment of writing, roughly 90% of the content of this article is contributed by and the bulk of the references are to his work. Please see User_talk:Tjo3ya/Archive_1 for further background.

It would be good to have someone neutral (and more knowledgable than myself) check this article for issues of WP:ADVOCACY and WP:UNDUE weight. I am also adding to the top of this talk page so that it can be updated when this has been done. Kaĉjo (talk) 08:57, 25 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Hi, I came here from the posting on the linguistics wikiproject page. Given that the term catena was coined by the other editor in his published research, I think it would be bad if the article didn't cite him a lot. On the whole, I don't see this article as violating WP:UNDUE though there are a couple places where I think the prose could be sharpened so that it summarizes the specific advantages of catenas rather than just broadly stating that they might help. I'm happy to give advice in that direction, though I don't have enough knowledge of dependency grammar to implement those changes myself. Botterweg14 (talk) 01:05, 27 June 2020 (UTC)


 * It's OK. Agree with what Botterweg14 says. Seems to be precise, accurate to me. Off-hand, I don't see anything given undue weight, nor any advocacy beyond the usual "our theory of grammar is better than your theory of grammar". 67.198.37.16 (talk) 19:33, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Possible undue weight in incoming links
This is related to the preceding discussion. I'd like to invite users more knowledgable than myself to review incoming links to this article (Special:WhatLinksHere/Catena_(linguistics)) to see whether references are useful and appropriate and to check against possible WP:UNDUE weight. The background is that I, while learning some syntax, saw a sentence I couldn't draw a tree of, found a relevant wiki, and there it seemed that the catena was a very common way to address the issue. I then discussed with my supervisor and he had never heard of it. Since most of the incoming links were added by the same user who has written most of this page (who has an apparent COI), it may be good to check incoming links. Kaĉjo (talk) 09:01, 25 June 2020 (UTC)


 * [moved above] Botterweg14 (talk) 12:37, 27 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Thanks for taking a look. I believe your comment relates to the previous section though? I intended this one to discuss incoming links. (You can delete my comment if you move yours.) Kaĉjo (talk) 07:09, 27 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Yes, thanks, I will move my comment above. Botterweg14 (talk) 12:36, 27 June 2020 (UTC)


 * I have used Catenas myself in my work on Dependency Construction Grammar in two places: in chapter 7, the section on Gapping and chapter 8, the section on Idioms. Note further that all constructions are catenas, but not all catenas are constructions. . Other users besides Tim Osborne are Thomas Gross (paper on Catenas in General in the 1st Depling volume, as well as one on clitics, in which Catenas play a role) as well as William O'Grady, Andreas Imrenyi, and Sylvain Kahane (I don't know the references for these last three.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dnmaxwell1 (talk • contribs) 17:56, 14 October 2021 (UTC)