Wiktionary:Votes/2022-01/Excluding trivial present participial adjectives

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Excluding trivial present participial adjectives

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Voting on:

  • For an English adjective sense to be included, at least one of the following conditions has to be met (for it is otherwise trivial):
  1. The adjective sense does not coincide with a present participle in pronunciation (i.e. is not a homophone).
  2. The adjective sense does not coincide with a present participle in orthography (i.e. is not a homograph).
  3. The adjective sense does not coincide with a present participle in etymology.
  4. The adjective sense does not have a 100% transparent meaning based on our definition of the corresponding verb (i.e. it does not mean "which VERBs" for any one of the verb's senses). The corresponding verb is understood as the verb whose present participle coincides with the adjective sense regarding criteria 1-3.

Rationale:

  1. By precedent: In the deletion discussion of spiring, the community has established a precedent of not including these kinds of adjectives. Judging from the currently ongoing RFD discussions, it is clear that it is merely a matter of time until one or the other RFD of such an adjective entry is going to fail, leaving the dictionary in an internally inconsistent state. The vote serves to remedy this.
  2. Of marginal use: Once somebody knows the grammar rule that present participles can be used adjectivally, all of these entries become self-evident.
  3. Bloat: These transparent adjective entries make navigating the existing articles harder, especially on mobile, not least because, unlike the true present participle entry, these adjectives are actually allowed to come with translation boxes (as is the case in growing). They also make it look like there's more than there actually is—when all there is is just duplication with no new semantics—increase editors' workloads, make them waste time, and can lead to errors, or entries gradually falling out of sync.
  4. Suppressing true information: Their inclusion makes looking up actually interesting information harder, an example of which is finding a list of all present participles that have acquired additional, unpredictable semantics in their adjectival sense (e.g. eating or becoming).
  5. A categorical mistake: Although each individual present participle has the property of being able to be used adjectivally, it is in fact the category of present participles that intrinsically possesses this quality. We shouldn't include this trivial information about the category of present participles within each present participle entry. The information of how to use present participles in general belongs to a grammar section.
  6. By analogy: To provide another point of reference, in German and Romanian, almost all adjectives (bar a few exceptions) can be used adverbially with no orthographic or phonetic alteration. Including every transparent adjective sense in all English present participles is tantamount to including adverb senses in all Category:German adjectives and Category:Romanian adjectives, which is, of course, patently absurd.

Schedule:

Discussion:

Support

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  1. Support as the opener of this vote. --Davi6596 (talk) 20:01, 26 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose

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  1. Oppose in its current form. I strongly object to the removal of any syntactic criterion. Even if these tests are sometimes tricky to apply, linguists generally recognize a difference between the use of forms such as "exciting" as a participle in contexts like "The boss showed favoritism to Alice and Bob, exciting jealousy in their coworkers" compared to its use as an undeniable adjective in contexts like "a very exciting story" or "I think that would be more exciting". There needs to be a clarification that "Adjective" entries are allowed for cases like this (or if an entry for the adjective "exciting" is in fact intended to be excluded as trivial, I disagree with that policy).--Urszag (talk) 23:39, 26 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @Urszag The problem of the former criterion 5 is its tautology. And I don't know how to add your clarification without making the proposal tautological. Davi6596 (talk) 01:01, 27 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I think I agree with the currently active criteria about when to include adjective entries in English (as far as I understand them). I guess it's inevitable that adhering to those criteria would make this proposal tautological, in the sense that there wouldn't be any changes with a "yes" vote, just a clarification of existing policy (though it looks like Wiktionary:English_adjectives#Words_ending_in_-ing is only a policy think tank, so I don't think it's entirely meaningless to formalize it with a vote). I can't quite tell at this point whether the proponents of this vote intend for it to be a mere clarification, or a meaningfully different policy from the current status quo. What is your intention?--Urszag (talk) 01:26, 27 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @Urszag My intention is to remove the Adjective label from present participles (and even from past ones, if it's the case too) that mean nothing besides "that which VERBs" (or "that which was VERBed" in the case of past participles), e.g. growing, for the reasons above.
    Maybe the vote should only propose removing participial adjective entries that fail the tests in Wiktionary:English adjectives. Davi6596 (talk) 01:48, 27 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    However, growing currently doesn't have an Adjective heading. It was removed before this vote even started. So why is this vote necessary?--Urszag (talk) 01:57, 27 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Because Wiktionary:English adjectives is only a policy think tank, as you said. Davi6596 (talk) 02:06, 27 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Well, if your goal is just to clarify that this policy think tank should be followed (not to exclude any adjectives that it allows), I think you should just leave in "The word meets generally accepted tests for being an adjective (for example, the ones in Wiktionary:English adjectives)" as a condition and ignore Ioaxxere's criticism that it is a tautology.--Urszag (talk) 03:19, 27 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @Urszag I'm thinking of canceling this vote and creating a separate vote to make Wiktionary:English adjectives an official policy, since it'd be broader than this. Davi6596 (talk) 16:42, 27 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, I think that makes sense. Of course before a vote starts for that, the whole page should be checked to make sure it is all up to date.--Urszag (talk) 06:44, 29 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Oppose per Urszag; categorically banning adjective entries of this sort doesn't make sense from a linguistic analysis standpoint, and unlike paper dictionaries we have (effectively) no space limitations to be wary of. I will check what CGEL says about this in a bit when I have time. —AryamanA (मुझसे बात करें • योगदान) 07:45, 27 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Oppose per the two peeps above me in this section. Whoop whoop pull up Bitching Betty ⚧️ Averted crashes 20:24, 27 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Oppose since, despite having opened this vote, I realized that, actually, this proposal is lexicographically narrow and problematic. It's better to start a vote on making Wiktionary:English adjectives official. --Davi6596 (talk) 14:04, 28 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Abstain

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  1. Abstain. The 'bloat' rationale is not unreasonable, but on the whole having both parts of speech strikes me as mostly harmless. Cnilep (talk) 01:45, 5 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Decision

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