RE: Motivation: Gerund or Infinitive

The basic problem is with the English language, which often uses the same word as a noun and a verb. Why don't we pick a language that doesn't do that? ;-) –Bill Kasdorf

From: Benjamin Young [mailto:bigbluehat@hypothes.is]
Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2015 4:49 PM
To: Denenberg, Ray
Cc: Web Annotation
Subject: Re: Motivation: Gerund or Infinitive

Well... :)

It would always technically *be* a verb, but I'm not sure it'd be clear in this JSON.

```
{
  "motivatedBy": "comment"
}
```

Really, though, the "to comment" form could be made as a custom set of SKOS Concepts for using the infinitive form:
http://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/#extending-motivations


But I'd want to see that available only as an extension and not mixed into the `oa` namespace as that would cause yet more confusion, I'm afraid.

Anyway. :) Saying the same thing different ways, so I'll let others weigh in.

Laters,
Benjamin

On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 3:57 PM, Denenberg, Ray <rden@loc.gov<mailto:rden@loc.gov>> wrote:

From: Benjamin Young [mailto:bigbluehat@hypothes.is]<mailto:[mailto:bigbluehat@hypothes.is]>

> oa:motivatedBy comment

> has potentially different meaning than

> oa:motivatedBy commenting

>

> The first (to me at least) implies that my annotation was motivated by a prior

> comment



Only if you take “comment” to be a noun, but the proposal is to use the infinitive form (where the "to" part of the infinitive is implied) thus it would always be understood to be a verb.



So:



oa:motivatedBy  "comment"

says:

" motivatedBy   to comment"



Admittedly this doesn't sound as good as if the predicate were (as we thought yesterday) oa:motivation.  in that case it would say:   "motivation: to comment".   Actually I’d like to change to predicate (back) to oa:motivation.



Ray