Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Expressive power of natural language


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   delete. Cirt (talk) 14:55, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Expressive power of natural language

 * ( [ delete] ) – (View AfD) (View log)

No sources, apparently original, doesn't belong in an encyclopedia. AlanHogue (talk) 23:28, 11 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete. The article tries to express a scholarly concept without reference to existing scholarly research. The article should have been entitled something like Language differences, and even with that title, it should have been written as a report on what scholarly thought has arrived at, not as a personal journey. Delete and start over. Binksternet (talk) 00:42, 12 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep. The article must be rewritten such that scholarly sources are given a voice. Binksternet (talk) 14:45, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

 Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Ron Ritzman (talk) 00:03, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep - there are many sources that can be found at Google scholar, and no all of those can be cruft. Bearian (talk) 17:55, 12 August 2009 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.


 * Comment. "Expressive power" has 76,800 Google Scholar hits. Most of these seem to be about computing, for which we have an article Expressive power. The term "Expressive power of natural language" might be a way to clarify that it is not about computing, and has 256 Google Scholar hits. It is the title of a book chapter or two: . Perhaps this is a coincidence, that this is not a term these scholars are using on purpose? Well, a search of "Expressive power in natural language" has two Scholar hits. "Expressive power of spoken language" has 4 Scholar hits. The term "Expressive power of language", with 245 Scholar hits is the only competitor, and given that it has one less word, you'd think it would be more common than the title of the article, not less. Abductive  (reasoning) 15:39, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete - Per Binksternet. Its tone is all wrong and the vocabulary is unnecessarily obtuse.  It's as if someone is trying to show off while presenting as little meaning as possible.  — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  16:48, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete Talks about a theoretical and speculative concept as if it were a vibrant field of research. This is not a widely used or accepted concept, though, and the only references to it cited are in this article, which is simply using it as one of the statistical measures in a paper and not discussing "expressive power" as a concept. (Also, interestingly, this is a paper about natural language processing&mdash;i.e., computers&mdash;used to cite a concept in a WP article that claims it's about human language.) And, all those points aside, the article is uninformative and unclear; if this does prove to be an article-worthy concept, then it can at least be rewritten. r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 18:17, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
 * This is just an original essay. If someone writes this up and gets it into a peer reviewed journal, perhaps it would be worth an article, but even then it would only be a dictionary definition of a term coined by a researcher.  It is not a field or an overarching concept in linguistics.  Dmz5  *Edits**Talk* 22:23, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Not true. The idea of expressive power very much is a concept in comparitive linguistics.  (The "of natural language" in the title is actually a disambiguator, to disambiguate this from the idea of expressive power in computer languages, which we have at expressive power.)  You can find this subject documented, for starters, in the entry for "expressive power" in volume 1 of The Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (ISBN 9780080359434).  One paper that a lot of sources on this subject cite is Edward L. Keenan's paper  Logical expressive power and syntactic variation in natural language, a copy of which can be found here.  A further paper by him in this field was Generalized quantifiers and the expressive power of natural language (1985). Uncle G (talk) 02:59, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete per Rjanag. Ironholds (talk) 14:29, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete Rjanag says it quite nicely. \ Backslash Forwardslash / (talk) 12:04, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.