Template talk:Linguistic typology topics

Italics
Why are Syntactic pivot and Theta role displayed in italics? The formatting seems to have been added with [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Linguistic_typology_topics&diff=prev&oldid=25475139 this edit], which offers no edit summary. Cnilep (talk) 00:04, 15 January 2014 (UTC)
 * I've removed the italics, because as far as I can tell, the only conceivable reason for them is that the editor thought they were more unusual than the other terms. — Eru·tuon 20:14, 8 March 2015 (UTC)


 * I just noticed that added the italics to "oligosynthesis", because the concept is theoretical, or not actually observed in an existing language. Perhaps I should've looked at the history before removing the italics. Still, not quite sure if italics is the best way to mark this term as purely theoretical. Either removing it from the table, or putting it in parentheses, might be better. Or we might simply leave the description of the term to the article on the term. — Eru·tuon 22:57, 8 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Just look to the stub on oligosynthetic language: it has no sources, not even a mention of any author. If you check its history, no source seems to have been added in its eleven years of existence. Besides, if the term is Google searched, few results appear and none of those I visited are trustworthy material like books and articles. But despite unsourced the stub is still clear, as you know: the concept is entirely theoretical, it has been called naturally impossible and it's only implemented on a handful of conlangs. I do not think it deserves any place in the same template of common, naturally occuring and indispensably important morphological classes such as polysynthetic, agglutinative, fusional, analytic, etc. It would fit, however, in some conlang template or list. That said, I'm re-adding the italics and placing the dubious tag. If no one answers this discussion in the next six months, I'm going to remove the term from the template. - Alumnum (talk) 20:30, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Isolating?
Shouldn't it be "analytic"? Isolating is about number of morphemes within a word, not inflection/lack thereof like polysynthetic, agglutinative, and fusional are. Tezero (talk) 15:12, 30 July 2014 (UTC)

Any intentionality in the order of subjects?
Ok, perhaps my real point is a different one again, but while the morphosyntactic subject is pretty concrete and I would say well defined (with the various types having relatively clear boundaries to one another, for "morphology" this is not the case. This is not Wikipedias fault - in my view this is a case both of (the unfortunately common phenomenon of) poorly defined linguistic terminology, but on top of this, a very ill-defined or unscientific approach to the subject matter in general - what the hell is supposed to be stated anyway? (and I'll not start on the fact of - if you want to try to apply the terms - the graded nature languages naturally have in regard to being "isolating" or "synthetic"..) . Anyway, long message, short point - wouldn't it make sense to highlight the clear-cut issue of morphosyntax a bit more (compared to "morphology"), and list those topics first, and morphosyntax after? Thanks for reading (if anyone does :P ), Sean 37.209.42.230 (talk) 17:09, 7 August 2015 (UTC)