Wiktionary talk:Votes/pl-2012-04/Editing the "part of speech" paragraph in ELE

Initialism

Initialisms and some others aren't technically parts of speech, nor indicating lexical function. They aren't “less traditional” – the are something else. For example, initialism indicates how the word was formed, and not its lexical function (which could still be noun, verb, etc.). The wording should be adjusted to reflect the technical reality and avoid contradiction. —Michael Z. 2012-04-02 19:57 z

The POS headers "Abbreviation", "Acronym" and "Initialism" are controversial. There have been a number of discussions considering removing them completely or partially, by replacing them with headers that do represent lexical functions. ^{(one short example, in RFDO)}

For example, "SMS" can be expanded to "Short Message Service", but that's just its etymology. In the sentences "I'm sending him a SMS." and "I'm SMSing him.", it behaves as a noun and a verb, respectively. Both are defined at SMS (current version, April 2012), which also has an "Initialism" POS section with "Short Message Service" as a definition.

Because of that controversy, I'd like to remove "Initialism" from that paragraph, as I believe it is not a good example for people who are starting to learn about our POS headers. If we can choose whatever three, or four, or five headers to mention, we might as well choose some not controversial.

By the way, I'd like to delete "idiomatic expressions" from that paragraph, too, as we don't use either "Idiomatic expression" or "Idiom" as POS headers. IIRC, the latter was acceptable once, but it is deprecated now. Feel free to correct me on this. --Daniel 00:20, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

I've rewritten the text while still mentioning "Initialism". Better? --Daniel 17:34, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

Hm. Are suffix and phrase lexical functions? Maybe, but they are not traditional parts of speech. And the question isn't really whether it's lexical information (I think it mostly is), but whether it's an actual part of speech, some other grammatical functionary, or something else altogether. How's this?

2. Part of speech may be a misnomer, but it seemed to make sense when it was first chosen. Most part-of-speech headings represent the lexical function of the term, such as Noun, Verb, Adjective, or Interjection. Others, such as Symbol, Suffix, Initialism, Phrase, or Proverb, classify the variety of terms defined in Wiktionary. Each entry has one or more part of speech sections, where the definitions themselves are found. The sections, most frequently, are level three, but may have a lower level for terms that have multiple etymologies or pronunciations.

 —Michael Z. 2012-04-06 05:24 z

Good. I like it. --Daniel 21:43, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

Tweaked it a bit.[1] Can multiple pronunciations really add a heading level? —Michael Z. 2012-04-08 00:31 z

Thanks. Yes. See subordinate, for an English example.

See this search for all entries with "Pronunciation 2" written somewhere. Apparently, hundreds of them are Latin entries, but I don't know how many, for sure. I just quickly skimmed the search results. --Daniel 00:49, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. FYI, I have done it with subordinate pronunciation headers, as in горілки (which actually differs in place of stress). —Michael Z. 2012-04-08 01:02 z