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Chinese classifier

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This peer review discussion has been closed.
I'm mostly looking for another pair of eyes to go through this article for a pre-FAC copyedit; I'm great at copyediting other people's writing but terrible at copyediting my own, since I already know what I'm trying to say. Also, I am concerned about keeping the article accessible and comprehensible to lay readers, so it would also be helpful if someone could keep an eye out for any parts that might be confusing and point them out.

Thanks, rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 04:51, 14 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I will go ahead and take a stab and this article. As I understand from your intro you are looking for copyediting. I will do a ce of the article and I will add suggestions here to help bring the article to FAC quality. A caveat here, I am totally ignorant of the subject matter so I will be looking primarily at MOS compliance, prose, grammar etc. Suggestions for content improvement will need to be sought from someone with more expertise. Sincerely, H1nkles (talk) 15:23, 18 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Lead

  • I'm not sure about the use of non-breaking spaces in the second paragraph in the lead. These are little things reviewers at FAC key in on.
  • Same can be said for hard dash (—). I'm not a 100% expert on WP:DASH so I'll just refer you to this for insight into whether or not you should use this form of dashes in the context it is used in the lead.
    • I think in that case they're pretty much the same as parentheses, and that use appears to be "allowed" by MOS. I think it's mostly a style/taste issue (for example, I remember a high school English teacher who believed that too many em dashes is a sign of poor writing...although I suppose you could say that about too many of any punctuation mark). rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 03:41, 19 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • "has been the subject of debate, with some proposing that classifier-noun pairings", I was just about to fix this portion of the sentence as it is in the passive voice but I'm not sure who you mean by "some". In the subject of the sentence it is "Speakers", but it isn't clear if that is who you intend with this part fo the sentence. Also watch for weasel wording here. I'm going to make a couple fixes to this run-on sentence, but I think it will need to be rewritten as it is unclear. Your thoughts on this would be instructive as this sentence is the crux of the paragraph.
    • Sorry about the ambiguity there. The people doing the proposing are not the "speakers", but the various linguists (basically, the people down in the bibliography) who are trying to understand why the speakers do what they do. I recognize the weasel issue, but at the same time I was trying to keep the lead pretty general, especially since the prototypicality theory is not strongly associated with any one person (like relativity and Einstein, for example...in an article on relativity it would make sense for the lede to mention Einstein, but as far as this topic is concerned there doesn't seem to be any one person famous for having this "breakthrough" idea, it's just sort of an idea that started floating around). rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 03:41, 19 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Types

  • I rewrote the intro sentence in this section, please review to see if it is an improvement and still conveys the meaning you intend.
  • This sentence, "In everyday speech, people often use the term "measure word" to cover all Chinese classifiers and massifiers,[14] and the Chinese term 量词　(liàngcí) itself, which is used like a "measure word" in everyday speech, translates as "measuring word",[15] but in actuality the various types of classifiers exhibit numerous differences in meaning, kinds of words they attach to, and other syntactic behavior" is a run-on sentence. Unfortunately it is very content-laden so I don't want to try and figure out how to break it up. The sentence is confusing to me, though, and I would appreciate clarification.
  • I unbolded the classifier and massifier words in this section as they are used earlier unbolded. I did switch them to italics to draw emphasis to them though.
    • That sounds good. I had originally bolded them because that was the first place they were really formally defined, I guess, but things have moved around and in any case the italics work just as well. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 03:54, 19 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • I put a [who?] template after "various authors" in the first sentence of the third paragraph in this section. At least put an in-line citation at the end of the sentence or a note, better to even attribute one of the "authors" to avoid weasel wording.
    • I meant that sentence more as an introduction to the paragraph than an actual content sentence. The rest of the paragraph is just examples of the things that have been proposed by the "various author", and each example has a footnote with a list of authors in it; I didn't bother citing the first sentence because I was thinking of it as basically a mini-lede. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 03:54, 19 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • This term, "whereas massifiers may not." is not grammatically correct (dangling participle) so I changed it to, "whereas massifiers do not have this option." I'm not sure if it still flows properly though. If you don't like it then change it back.
  • I added another [who?] template to the second to last sentence in the last paragraph in this section. Same issue as above.
    • The footnote is at the end of the following sentence; I figured it should be clear because the one sentence flows into the other, but I could move the footnote to right after "some researchers" if you think that would be an improvement. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 03:54, 19 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • The lion's share of this section is devoted to nominal classifiers with a very short sub-section on verbal classifiers. I understand that nominal classifiers are used more often. Is there anything else that could be added to the verbal classifier section? It just seems unbalanced to have so much information on one and so little on the other?
    • Unfortunately, as far as I know there's not much more that can be said; there are very few verbal classifiers, and they haven't really generated much research interest. There's no reason they shouldn't (there are just as many questions about them as there are about the nominal classifiers), it's just that all the "hot topics" seem to have been in issues relating to nominal classifiers, so that's what all the literature talks about; there's not much to say about the verbal ones other than that they exist. Also, the reason so much spaces is devoted to nominal classifiers is mainly just to explain the distinction between classifiers and massifiers (because I figured it might be complicated, so I ought to spend some time making it clear rather than just glossing over it); within verbal classifiers there is no widely-accepted distinction like that, so there's nothing major to explain. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 03:54, 19 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

(outdent) I've got to move on for a while to other things but I will return to continue to review. H1nkles (talk) 16:34, 18 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your copyedits so far. I just moved and am still getting things unpacked so I'm in a rush right now, but I'll try to leave some responses soon. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 02:46, 19 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
No rush, I'm continuing my review in the midst of real life concerns as well. Keep up the good work. H1nkles (talk) 15:28, 19 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Relation to nouns

This section is pretty solid, I did a couple of minor copy edits but for the most part it's sound. I moved one of the notes outside a parentheses, which is more stylistic than anything. I commend you for the frequency of examples, which helps cement the difficult concepts into the reader's mind. I also liked how you added a very brief description of asphasics so the reader was not left feeling dumb for not knowing the definition of an asphasic. H1nkles (talk) 15:46, 19 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Origins and historical development

  • "this suggests that ____ predate classifiers by several centuries" is there a missing word here? It seems like should be a word here but I could be wrong.

Purpose

  • "to introduce major characters or items (as opposed to minor characters or items)" I don't think you need the information in the parentheses. Seems superfluous to me.
  • Also watch the use of dashes (-) when you are giving an example. This is found throughout the article and is fine in limited usage but could be frowned upon at FAC. Again this is more stylistic than anything.
  • Can you give an example of an example with problematic use of dashes? I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to. If you mean the use of dashes in the word-by-word glosses, some of that is related to standards within the field (for example, using dashes between certain kinds of compound words and not others). rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 17:05, 19 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • In the lead you use a colon (Different nouns often require different classifiers, based on inherent properties of that noun: for example, many flat objects such as tables, papers, beds, and benches use the classifier 张 (張) zhāng,) and parentheses [and others claim that they are just motivated by analogy to more "prototypical" pairings (for example, "dictionary" takes the same classifier as the more common word "book").], and dash (Finally, Chinese also has "massifiers", or words that are not specific to any one object—for example, the massifier 盒 (hé, "box") may be used with anything that fits into boxes, such as cigarettes or books, even though those nouns also have their own special classifiers.) In the Usage section you use a semi colon, (On the other hand, when a noun is not counted or introduced with a demonstrative, a classifier is not necessary;[8] for example, there is a classifier in 三辆车 (sān liàng chē, three-CL car, "three cars")). You shift back and forth between semi-colons and parentheses until the Categories and prototypes subsection when you shift to dashes and use this format 4 times (I removed two other times towards the end of the article). I understand that context requires different punctuation but per WP:DASH dashes other than em and en dashes should be avoided when possible in the article. Again this is stylistic but could be nit picked at FAC, which is why I bring it up here. H1nkles (talk) 17:18, 19 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • I've gone through the page (just searching the page for "for example" and replaced most of the punctation with semicolons. In a few places, though, I just split it into two sentences. The one instance that uses parentheses I kept, since it's two examples of two different things within the same sentence, which means semicolons wouldn't really work. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 04:00, 30 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

References

  • These look good, I believe that page ranges (pp. 3–6) need hard (ndash) dashes. You may want to check this but in one article I passed through FA Olympic Games the page ranges have hard dashes.
  • Ref [24] is formatted oddly w/o the (p.), is there a reason for that?
  • Ref. [28] has a p. x, why is that? I just realized that x is for Roman numeral 10, sorry. H1nkles (talk) 16:53, 19 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • A couple of refs have no page numbers at all, this will be noticed at FAC.
  • These are for cases when the reference is the entire article. For example, "one article was about bla bla bla", I just reference the whole article. I suppose I could hack it by referencing the first page, where the abstract is, but I don't know how much difference it makes. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 17:05, 19 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • What about ISBNs on the various books, some have them and some don't. Why is that?
  • Looks like I missed a couple, and have added them where possible. Some of these books just don't have ISBNs, as far as I know; Chao (1968) is just really old and I've never seen an isbn for it, and the book with the Peyraube chapter is really just a conference proceedings. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 17:05, 19 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

More comments on the lead

I think the lead is going to need some work.

  • There is information, much of the last paragraph, that does not appear to be in the article. At least I can't recall seeing amounts of classifiers in the article (though I could be wrong).
  • You have information in the article (origins, historical development, and purpose for example) that are not mentioned in the lead.
  • You'll need to do some work to make the lead jive with the rest of the article.

(Outdent) ok that is all for my review. The article is coming along nicely. As you continue to refine the article keep in mind what you say in the latter stages of the article, most languages do not have classifiers, so most readers will have no concept of what a classifier is, much less why it exists or what it means. Make sure you keep the article as readable for the general population as possible (keep the cookies on as low a shelf as you can). I think the abundance of examples really help the article. There are a few instances of jargon, (discursive, salient, foreground, and bound morphemes) that could be defined a little bit, but you do wikilink them and the reader could do further research should s/he desire to know more. Keep up the good work. H1nkles (talk) 16:50, 19 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

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