User:Kayau/Why Wikipedia's syntax coverage sucks

Wikipedia's coverage on syntax sucks, and in many degrees. At least half the articles would benefit from a complete rewriting. Relative clause and some of the grammatical category articles are probably the only articles of reasonable quality.

Morphology and phonology are not much better, but if one ventures far enough from syntax, into the domain of phonetics, one immediately finds a collection of fine articles that accurately summarise the sum of linguists' related work. Not to mention other sciences like statistics, where detailed articles are easy to find. This essay will not speculate on why this is the case, but will rather point out how they are bad and suggest solutions to fix them.

The problems with syntax articles

There are, broadly, at least six huge problems in Wikipedia's syntactic coverage:

1. Gaps in coverage. Minor syntactic phenomena are often not covered or only given stubs, e.g. Heavy NP shift. In some cases, such as clause chaining, no article (as of January 2017) exists at all. Lack of comprehensiveness is clearly against Wikipedia's goals to cover all notable topics.
2. Eurocentrism. In many cases, articles list only English examples. Those with huge lists of examples generally have huge Indo-European lists, plus a few Finno-Ugric, Semitic or East Asian languages. Moreover, structures found in European languages are sometimes taken to be central or prototypical, while others are given short shrift.
3. Articles are about languages, not language. Lists of examples should not be created solely for the sake of listing examples. Adding Chinese to Reflexive verbs is a good move, because it is an important language where long-distance 'anaphora' was identified. Adding all six major Romance languages is generally pointless.
4. Lack of theoretical treatments. This is not to say that all analyses ever published in the NLLT deserve mentions. The majority do not. However, when influential analyses like Austin and Bresnan (1996) get no more than a sentence in Non-configurational language while dependency grammar gets a full section, there is a problem. In fact, it almost looks as if Timothy Osborne has gone through the majority of Wikipedia's syntax articles, adding DG analyses, while theoreticians from every other framework has ignored WP. This is a huge problem. Hengeveld's FDG account of non-verbal predication belongs on Copula (linguistics), and ditransitive verb needs Larson's account (as much as it's nonsense). This is not to denigrate DG as a framework. It is hugely influential in computational linguistics, so if a construction poses a notable challenge in the field, it - along with DG solutions - ought to be presented. But there is little need to go into detailed theoretical DG analyses in subjects where little DG work has been done (and the work that has been done is rarely cited).
5. Lack of synchronic typology. How can Split ergativity not mention the Silverstein hierarchy?
6. Lack of diachrony. Recurrent paths of grammaticalisation have been a central area of linguistic research since Heine and Reh. For syntax articles to exclude diachronics is totally unacceptable, and is another symptom of the 'languages, rather than language' disease prevalent in syntax articles.
7. Lack of psycholinguistics. In many cases, influential work has been done on the acquisition, processing or production of syntactic constructions. These ought to be included in the article whenever possible.

If all syntax articles were properly written, probably at least half of them would have to be rewritten entirely.

Hall of shame

It must be noted that this hall of shame does not actually intend to shame articles or their contributors. The two articles listed are typical of WP's syntax coverage. They are presented only as exemplars.

Case

At the very beginning of the article, case is defined as marking grammatical functions only. This is clearly false, as case can mark thematic roles in many languages. Quirky subject was not mentioned or even linked to.