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See also this post from tchrist (way back in Jan 2014!): The Great ELU Tag Clean-up Proposal of 2014

Edit Oct 16, 2015: As has been previously discussed on the overall Stack Exchange meta site, the procedure for the community to process tag synonyms is pretty broken for small tags. For this reason, I'd like to repeat my previous request for a moderator to take action and make some of these synonyms. This post received 3 upvotes and 0 downvotes; tchrist's post that I linked has 21 upvotes and 0 downvotes. I've left this post up for a while, and nobody has objected to any of these proposed synonyms. Besides this edit, I'm also going to try to contact a moderator in chat.

Former suggestions that have now been implemented:

  • (0 followers, 58 questions) should be made a synonym of (2 followers, 192 questions). Completed.
  • (0 followers, 14 questions) should be made a synonym of (0 followers, 103 questions). Completed.
  • (1 follower, 55 questions) should be made a synonym of (2 followers, 403 questions). Basically all verb agreement in English is with the subject (Araucaria pointed out one exception, proximity concord, that seems pretty marginal to me), so these tags have a huge amount of overlap. Everything in should safely fall under the category of "verb-agreement" as a whole. Completed.
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  • The synonym, progressive, has to be voted by five users in order to pass english.stackexchange.com/tags/progressive-aspect/synonyms Passive as a synonym for passive-voice here english.stackexchange.com/tags/passive-voice/synonyms
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Oct 4, 2015 at 18:22
  • @Mari-Lou: thank you! In this case, the relevant tag is actually just "perfect." You have one answer in the category so far, but you also have some answers in "perfect-aspect"... perhaps some of these questions could be retagged.
    – herisson
    Commented Oct 4, 2015 at 18:37
  • Yes, I read that it takes a day or so.
    – herisson
    Commented Oct 4, 2015 at 18:39
  • @Mari-LouA: I'll remind you :) Thanks again for helping. I'll try to gather enough rep to vote up these synonyms. But, I'm not sure it's a good idea to make "simple" and "simple-present" synonyms of "present-tense"... the simple present contrasts with the present progressive, but both fall under the general category of "present-tense."
    – herisson
    Commented Oct 5, 2015 at 9:25
  • The tag simple is ambiguous, does it mean: simple-present/present-simple or "easy" "simplified", if someone thinks a phrase such as "he is walking" can be classified as simple, well that's even worse IMO, it should be retagged as present-progressive or progressive-aspect. And simple-present will be fine in present-tense. In any case there are only 3 questions with that tag. Generally speaking, I find the tag system on EL&U to be a bit of a muddle.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Oct 6, 2015 at 6:18
  • I don't know why I can't suggest a synonym for perfect-aspect. Strange... Someone else shall have to do it.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Oct 8, 2015 at 21:39
  • No one is voting to approve the synonyms ?? Try seeing if you can suggest a synonym for present-perfect, I'll upvote it to get the ball rolling.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Oct 10, 2015 at 11:14
  • @sumelic Something HUGE!! If you mean that the verb must agree with the grammatical number of the Subject, the answer is that in many cases it doesn't - because it often agrees with the notional/semantic plurality or singularness of the subject. However both of those involve subjects. Another case to think of is that in many, many types of construction there is no subject which has a defined grammatical number in the clause and therefore the number is inherited from some other part of the sentence. Lastly things like proximity concord can override subject-verb agreement ...
    – Araucaria - Him
    Commented Oct 12, 2015 at 14:06
  • 1
    @sumelic ... So should they be synonymised? Yes, But: what this means is that subject-verb agreement should be mapped on to verb-agreement and definitely not the other way round!
    – Araucaria - Him
    Commented Oct 12, 2015 at 14:08
  • @Araucaria: that is the synonymization I was trying to suggest. Notional agreement is still agreement with the subject, as you mention. Thanks for bringing up proximity concord; that's a good point that I did not consider (although it seems relatively rare to me, and I can't think of any examples that are considered standard).
    – herisson
    Commented Oct 12, 2015 at 17:09
  • 1
    meta.stackexchange.com/questions/127459/… seems to indicate fairly conclusively that voting on synonyms is unlikely to work until the system is changed to make it function much better.
    – Nathan Tuggy
    Commented Oct 13, 2015 at 23:05
  • @NathanTuggy: Since I made this meta post, the moderators should be able to monitor the situation with these tags and take appropriate action if the process drags on for too long with these synonyms.
    – herisson
    Commented Oct 14, 2015 at 5:41
  • @Mari-LouA I tried to vote up but it says I don't have enough rep...enough tag specific rep. That is a design failure because I may very well have enough tag specific rep to vote on suggestions, but I have no idea how to find them. There should be a tag voting suggestion queue if anyone is ever going to bother such voting.
    – Mitch
    Commented Oct 16, 2015 at 22:18
  • Congratulations - it looks like this bunch has been cleared! Would you like to nominate the next 2 or 3 collections to consolidate?
    – Lawrence
    Commented Mar 23, 2016 at 13:32

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
4

Please give your approval for the following synonyms, thank you.

  1. progressive should be the synonym of
  2. passive should be the synonym of
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  • "progressive" is better as not a synonym of "present-progressive" in my opinion. As it is, it serves the role of a general tag. Mapping "present-progressive" to "progressive" would be better. But, I think it's best for them to remain separate.
    – herisson
    Commented Oct 8, 2015 at 21:26
  • My mistake/typo, it is progressive-aspect. Rectified.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Oct 8, 2015 at 21:29
  • OK, that explains it!
    – herisson
    Commented Oct 8, 2015 at 21:33
  • @sumelic These tags have been synonymised, could you accept the answer so that it is closed?
    – BladorthinTheGrey
    Commented Nov 28, 2016 at 17:17
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As (96 questions) and (56 questions) remain separate and accumulating questions, even though they clearly refer to the same concept, if there is no consensus on whether to call it an aspect or tense, we should merge to and make the synonym.

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