Hidden Verbs

[MichaelCarychao]

How about catching hidden verbs? Some word endings that flag verbs hiding as nouns: ment, ion, ance, ence.

[RichardLitt]

Sounds interesting. Want to make a module for it and we'll see how it looks?

[fguerrer77]

Will see

[RichardLitt]

@MichaelCarychao Can you provide more examples, too?

[MichaelCarychao]

Cool to see your interest. Here's a solid explanation of hidden verbs from
PlainLanguage.gov:

A hidden verb is a verb converted into a noun. It often needs an extra verb
to make sense. So we write, "Please make an application for a personal
loan" rather than "Please apply for a personal loan."

Hidden verbs come in two forms. Some have endings such as -ment, -tion,
-sion, and -ance or link with verbs such as achieve, effect, give
, have, make, reach, and take. Often, you will find a hidden verb
between the words "the" and "of."
http://www.plainlanguage.gov/howto/wordsuggestions/hiddenverbs.cfm

On Wednesday, March 11, 2015, Richard Littauer [email protected]
wrote:

@MichaelCarychao https://github.com/MichaelCarychao Can you provide
more examples, too?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#38 (comment).

[ndarville]

You’ll want to detect “nominal suffixes”, ie suffixes turning verbs to nouns. There’re a bunch of examples in the link.

I don’t know how to write a linter without false positives, though, since a lot of adverbs and normal nouns will be flagged as well. Writing a dedicated dictionary seems overkill—and add to this that nounified verbs aren’t necessarily bad; perfectly useful words like “invitation” would be flagged, for instance.

And you could also go the other way around and detect verbifications.

And let’s not get started on hidden adjectives ... :)