Talk:Generative principle

Merge suggestion

There is a lot of good material here, but it does already look quite similar to some of the other linguistic entries in the disambiguation page on Generative. Maybe it can be merged into some of these articles? Or maybe it can become a more general page and have links to the more specific senses? Ideas will be appreciated. — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 12:15, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

To Stradivarius: thank you for looking at the article. I did have another look at "generative grammar" and "generative linguistics." The basic idea is indeed the same: the productive potential of language, our capacity to make infinite use of finite means. But apart from that there is no overlap at all: my subject is foreign language pedagogy, whereas the other articles concern linguistic theory, pure and unapplied. We are really on the safe side here. I contributed an article on the generative principle in the renowned Routledge encyclopedia (as cited) and re-wrote it for Wikipedia.- But could you help me with the layout of the last paragraph which I added. The teaching example should be grouped as I did in the source text. Now it's a running text. And I'm helpless with these technicalities. On the other hand I succeeded with the footnote Clara Park. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Laradoks (talk • contribs) 09:31, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Hi Laradoks, thank you for the clarification. I fixed the formatting for the last paragraph; have a look and see if you like it. As for merging articles, the main reason I'm asking is to work out how to fit this material in with the rest of Wikipedia - like another editor wrote on your talk page, at the moment there are no articles linking here, so it is unlikely that people will find it. (I did put a link to this page on the disambiguation page at Generative, though.) I want to fit in a link somewhere in Second language acquisition and/or Language education, but I'm still wondering what the best way to do it is. If you see anywhere in those two articles that we could mention this article, then please let me know and I'll have a go at putting a summary and a link in. They aren't all that well-written at the moment though - I have a feeling we might need to add new sections on "Principles of language teaching" or similar. I might also have a go at writing a general article for all the meanings of "generative" in linguistics, with summaries and links to all the existing articles. I think this would be a good introduction to the concept, and it could be linked from a lot of different linguistics articles, not just ones about L2, meaning it would be easy for someone to find your page when browsing casually. All the best. — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 15:22, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

I've had look at the two articles mentioned. To my taste they are too long,try to cover too much material which could be ordered quite differently etc. etc., so personally I'd rather not fiddle with them. I prefer short articles in which something is explained clearly and succinctly. But that's just a personal preference and my way of using wikipedia.Best wishes.Laradoks (talk) 08:46, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

Notability

About the recently added notability template - maybe this page would be better off moved? The only sources I could find for this exact wording were this and this, which were both already cited as references. The problem is that they both seem to be written by the user that wrote the Wikipedia entry, although they are both respectable scholarly works. The principle itself, however, seems valid enough - it is the fundamental argument for Chomsky's generative grammar. The problem would seem to be where to fit it in. — Mr. Stradivarius ^♫ 17:58, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Well, but is the name "generative principle" at least an existing term in linguistics? It´s not enough that it makes sense, and that people know what you are talking about.—Preceding unsigned comment added by Quest09 (talk • contribs) 13:22, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Looking at the sources more closely, it seems to also be used in the context of children learning to read their native language (see [1][2][3][4]). This is not reflected in the present article, however. As for whether it is an existing term in linguistics, the answer seems to be yes. Even though it does not seem widely used, it has an entry in the Routledge encyclopedia of language teaching and learning, and this seems more than enough to prove its notability. What we need is to edit the article to show both the other use in first language reading and to demonstrate the frequency of its use compared with other linguistic terms. It also looks like some original research has slipped into the article, which I shall remove forthwith. — Mr. Stradivarius ^♫ 15:18, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

About the original research: I was thinking of the passage starting with "But notice that, for every sentence, we can easily come up with fitting communicative contexts". I'm not so sure that this is original research now - while it is uncited, I think it is likely to be found somewhere in the Butzkamm and Caldwell book. This makes me loath to delete it, as doing so would kill the flow of the article. This doesn't change the need for a re-write, though. — Mr. Stradivarius ^♫ 15:30, 30 April 2011 (UTC)