Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Language fragment

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. The article is entirely unsourced, hence unverifiable, and per WP:V all challenged unverifiable content is to be removed. The "keep" opinions do not address the failure of the article to meet that core policy. Sandstein 06:05, 10 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Language fragment

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Page appears to be original research. It suggests that 'Language fragment' is a term of art in linguistics or some other field of language study, yet there is no evidence that this is so. Although a number of scholarly papers containing the phrase were located at Google Scholar, these appear to use the phrase in a general sense with a variety of ordinary-language meanings, not as a specialized term. See discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Theoretical Linguistics#Language fragment. Cnilep (talk) 19:18, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Language-related deletion discussions. —Cnilep (talk) 19:20, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete I can find no evidence of this term having this specific meaning, which may be getting confused with sentence fragments. Thryduulf (talk) 19:27, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep It's a stub, it will be fleshed out, it's not doing anything malicious. The original wording was "A fragment of a language is a subset...", so the stub was making no 'term of art' claim. The example is a bit strange, but the page needs more work, not deletion. M 21:46, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry if 'term of art' is (perhaps ironically?) an unfamiliar term of art. It just means a term used with a specific meaning in some field, as opposed to a word or phrase with ordinary, non-specialized meaning. If language fragment had a specialized meaning in linguistics, it would be worthy of inclusion here. Cnilep (talk) 14:37, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Neutral. The phrase is in fact attested in scholarly literature, but as noted in a variety of contexts that may just mark the variety of plain-English notions that "language fragment" calls forth. It apparently appears most frequently in works related to "cognitive science" and similar forms of cyber-scholasticism and metaphysical engineering, which again makes me wonder whether there is enough substance in any of these uses to make a well formed article in English. If this is kept, I've added a sentence to link to one of the alternative senses noted in the discussion. For the time being, it might best be turned into a disambiguation page aiming at sentence element and attested language, maybe others. - Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 15:13, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Comment I can't honestly say delete just because it's a poorly written article that makes no effort to inform anybody about the subject, or that it has no citation to sources that might be able to explain the concept without a lot of buzzwords and jargon, since those are problems that can be fixed. But I have no desire to say "keep" on this piece of crap of an article. Mandsford (talk) 18:41, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep - just a stub that needs expansion. Bearian (talk) 20:39, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

But expand to what, exactly? I am a linguist, but I'm not aware of any specialized usage of the term "language fragment". That doesn't mean none exists, certainly, but if it does, I'm not aware of what that usage is. More importantly, I can't find one in the references I've consulted. Cnilep (talk) 15:17, 4 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Crystal's Dictionary of Linguistics & Phonetics, an excellent source for linguistics terminology, does not include "language fragment" or even "fragment"; ditto SIL International's Glossary of Linguistic Terms. And this glossary, which I found using Google, includes "sentence fragment" but no other use of "fragment". If, as I suspect, "language fragment" has only the ordinary language sense of "a fragment of language", then an encyclopedia article on the term would be no more useful than one for any other two-word phrase from Chevy Truck to Blue paint. Cnilep (talk) 15:48, 4 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

While it's clear what blue paint is, it is unclear what a fragment of language might be, and this provides an explanation that can do no harm. While it may not be a general linguistics term, it may be used within some perfectly notable subgroup that the few editors here are not aware of. I've found such stub pages very useful when looking up strange terms with ambiguous meanings, and I've often been annoyed to see that the topic I was looking up has been deleted. It's a stub, not all of our stubs have citations. And we have plenty of articles that are not named according to general glossaries. M 21:49, 6 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Firstly you appear to be asking for a definition of the term, Wikipedia is not a dictionary and so definitions are left to your sister project Wiktionary which is a dictionary.
Secondly, it appears there is no standard definition of what a "language fragment" is, and that it can be used to mean anything that the combination of "language" and "fragment" can mean. In Wiktionary jargon this is described as "sum of parts" i.e. it means nothing different to what the sum of its parts means, and thus wouldn't be accepted as an entry there any more than "blue paint" would be. If there were a specialised (or even specific) meaning, then Wikipedia could (but not necessarily should) have an article on that subject, however as such a meaning does not exist then there is nothing to write an article about.
Thirdly, your final couple of sentences appear to be that other stuff exists, which as the linked page explains is not a valid reason to keep (or delete) anything. Thryduulf (talk) 22:59, 6 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Delete: This seems like a synonym of Sublanguage.--RDBury (talk) 03:19, 10 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

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.