User:Sschuler/sandbox

1) Article has a B grade and currently has no rating on the importance scale.

2) There is very little citation throughout the article. There are a few instances where it has been marked that citation or clarification is needed for a particular fact, but most of the sources are not cited throughout the text, so I cannot be sure which reference the information is coming from. There are a lot of 'Note' sources, but only a few sources listed under 'References'. I felt that most of the information was relevant, although the article seems disjointed. A lot of the more basic concepts and terms come later in the article, while more technical discussions show up earlier in the article. I think that it would be helpful if the article was re-worked somewhat to have some of the easier concepts first, especially the difference between inflection and derivation. I think that for most students or people unfamiliar with inflection, this is an important distinction to make early on.

3) The article appears to be neutral.

4) There are four sources cited under the Reference heading of this article. Two of them are books which I could not access online. The other two sources link to a site that seems to be affiliated with U Penn, but the cite continuously crashes or fails to load, so these links need to be redone so that they connect to sources that readers can actually access.

5) There is a lot of discussion of English inflection, although I do not think that this view is overrepresented. If someone is reading the article in English, it makes sense that there are a lot of English examples because the reader can better understand the examples if they are in their language. There is also a large section about inflection in other languages which I found helpful, and helps contrast inflection in English with inflection in other languages.

6) Most of the citations in the Notes section were from textbooks. I was able to find a few of them online, but could only preview the books, so I was not able to check the actual pages that were listed in the article citation. I cannot say whether or not there appears to be any plagiarism or close paraphrasing, but most of the sources under 'Notes' seem to be reliable sources.

7) a. "Introduction too long?" This thread on the Talk page brings up the issue that the introduction section of the article is very long and doesn't make a clear definition of what inflection is. I agree with this assessment and also feel that the introduction section should be trimmed to a more concise 'intro' of the topic that a wide audience can understand, and allow the rest of the article to delve into some of the more technical aspects, exceptions, and examples.

b. "Inflection of Hakka?" This thread was brought up by a user who was unable to find any sources that back up the existence of inflection in the Hakka language. There is a section in the article that discusses inflection in this language, but no references are cited. The user who left the comment was unfamiliar with inflection in Hakka and suggested removing the section until a reference could be cited. I think that this user made a good point and agree that this section should probably not be included until there is an appropriate reference which backs up the claims made in the article.

English inflects verbs through suffixation of nouns, adjectives, and verbs. There are eight inflectional affixes in English that serve different functions:

- plural (-s) as in dogs

- possessive (-'s or -s') as in "the dog's tail" or "the dogs' tails"

- third person singular present (-s) as in "he waits here"

- past tense (-ed) as in "he waited yesterday"

- progressive (-ing) as in "he is waiting"

- past participle (-en or -ed) "he has eaten" or "he has kicked"

- comparative (-er) as in "he is faster"

- superlative (-est) as in "he is fastest"