User:Wildebeez/Choose an Article

Article Selection
Please list articles that you're considering for your Wikipedia assignment below. Begin to critique these articles and find relevant sources.

Option 1

 * Article title
 * Patient (grammar)


 * Article Evaluation
 * This is a "start"-class article on a word I learned in our last day of class ... so thanks for the hint, Dr. Bowie! This article is very short and is flagged because it isn't written clearly. There are only three citations, and one is a broken link from eight years ago. This article can be improved to not only define grammatical patient, but also demonstrate how it is used in the grammatical structure of various languages. The article could also include a one or two sentence description of Thematic relation to contextualize the definition of "patient."


 * Sources
 * Agent–patient word-order preference in the acquisition of Tagalog
 * Semantic Macroroles in Role and Reference Grammar
 * Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition
 * Exploring Language Structure: A Student's Guide

Option 2

 * Article title
 * Ebonics (word)


 * Article Evaluation
 * All the article's content is relevant to "Ebonics" as a word, but it does not clearly cite strong reasons why the term "African-American Vernacular English (AAVE)" is preferred over the word "Ebonics" among linguists. Though this preference is made clear, the article does favor this position without presenting an argument for its continued use as a word with grammatical and linguistic meaning distinct from the narrower definition of AAVE. This would be important information to add and cite because it discusses a commonly misrepresented dialect of people in the African Diaspora. The articles in the citation section are reliable so far, but there is at least one part of the existing article that says "full citation needed." The coiner of "Ebonics" purports that the structure of languages under the umbrella term "Ebonics" define a wholly separate language from English, rather than a mere dialect. This article fails to discuss the features of Ebonics as separate from AAVE and whether there has been any scholarship on the validity of that claim.


 * Sources
 * Bias, Disguise, and Co-opted Science: Altruism as “Scientized” Ideology Across the English Professions—The Peculiar Case of “Ebonics”
 * Ebonics: The Urban Education Debate
 * Toward a new perspective in Negro English dialectology

Option 3

 * Article title
 * The Art of Grammar


 * Article Evaluation
 * I recognize the author of this work from our readings in Crystal's textbook. This article is a stub, and what little information is there still contains incomplete citations. This article can stand to include more description of the content of the book, while including cited discussion of the impact of this work of grammar. The content in the article so far is neutral, but mostly bare-bones. I am interested in the fact that the article mentions in an uncited statement that The Art of Grammar was published into Armenian. For this assignment, I found a source for that statement and learned that this book was one of the first secular works translated from Greek to Armenian, and as a result, the entire Armenian language experienced a shift toward Greek conventions. This is an interesting impact that could easily be discussed as the article expands.


 * Sources
 * An Uncomfortable Compromise: Armenian and the τέχνη γραμματική
 * At the Origins of Greek Grammar
 * The Western Classical Tradition in Linguistics

Option 4

 * Article title
 * Gullah language


 * Article Evaluation
 * This article contains a lot of information, but it requires more editing to cite more inline sources to support the body content. While most sections are written clearly and with detail, the "Grammar" subsection of the article is not detailed at all; it does not include any descriptions of grammatical conventions in Gullah, other than an unordered list of example sentences that exhibit certain morphology and syntax. It also is worth mentioning that the "Grammar" subsection of the article contains zero citations. This subsection needs to be expanded to illustrate grammatical conventions in Gullah, and discuss the dialect's tense and aspect constructions.


 * Sources
 * Contemporary Gullah Speech: Some Persistent Linguistic Features
 * A Historical Analysis of Tense-mood-aspect in Gullah Creole: a Case of Stable Variation.
 * Copula Variability in Gullah

Option 5

 * Article title
 * Iyaric


 * Article Evaluation
 * The article could use serious rewriting and restructuring. The introduction of the article is far too long and provides too much detail into specifics of the Iyaric dialect that could be in the body of the article. The article provides a very robust description of the vocabulary in Iyaric without exploring the other grammatical features of the dialect. Speakers of Iyaric believe that English is a language that was/is imposed by colonizers — so not only does this article pertain to an underrepresented subculture, but it also commands need for edits that differentiate it further from "standard" varieties of English other than vocabulary. This dialect overlaps with Jamaican Patois and Jamaican English, so there are grammatical features worth exploring in a re-write. The references section contains only two scholarly articles, and the article itself does not contain many inline citations that refer to the list of references at the end.


 * Sources
 * Linguistic ideologies and the historical development of language use patterns in Jamaican music
 * The development of English in Jamaica
 * Overstanding Idren: Special Features of Rasta Talk Morphology
 * Dread Talk—The Speech of the Rastafarian in Jamaica
 * Innovation in Jamaican Creole. The speech of Rastafari
 * Jamaican Creole