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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]