On 17/02/15 17:25, Paul Schaffner wrote:
On this particular set of issues, I'd agree that the gerunds sound very odd in anglophone ears, that nouns are both more consistent and more idiomatic, but that if verbal forms are needed, past participles are perhaps a better choice. Two advantages of past participles ("sent" "received") are that they correspond neatly to at least some of the usual fields of email ("sent by" "received" "delivered to" "x-resolved-to"
so "sentBy" and "deliveredTo" rather than "sending"/"receiving" ? Fine by me. I will modify the tagdocs/examples accordingly.
etc.), and that they are a little easier to expand when more actions are required. Much of the (printed) correspendence that we deal with, for example, is either official or illicit; the former frequently undergoes other actions like "endorsed / endorsement" "recorded" "notarized" "authenticated" "acknowledged" "extracted [from the rolls]" etc., not all of which are happily captured as nouns; and the latter includes actions like "decoded" and "intercepted," ditto.
But are all these actions part of the "communicative process"? Or are some of them really about the associated source?