Renaming universal features and/or their values?

[dan-zeman]

In the future versions of the UD standard we may want to add features/values (i.e. shift them from the language-specific zone to the universal zone), which is easy, or refine their definitions, which is less easy but may become necessary.

Do we also want to consider renaming existing features/values? One suggestion has been raised by @yoavg here: #218 (comment)
Other names may become strange after we add new languages where the definition matches but the current terminology is too exotic (e.g. VerbForm=Trans when applied to non-Slavic languages).

Unfortunately, unlike adding new features/values, renaming is an unpopular measure that has a large potential to break tools and stored data, while the benefit is only aesthetical (speaking from experience). I am not strictly against renaming, but I think we should not hurry with that. And we should gather other candidates, so that if we rename anything at all, we try to do the changes at once.

[dan-zeman]

Copying my own comment from #218 regarding negativeness:

@yoavg : I agree that Negative=Pos sounds weird. The feature used to be called negativeness, and negativeness=pos sounds a little bit less weird to me, but still weird. I think that years ago the value was aff (for affirmative, instead of positive) and I do not remember the reason why it was changed to pos.

Polarity is not bad. If we decide to go for it in the future, then Pos will be IMHO better value than Aff.

[dan-zeman]

Another possible renaming has been suggested in #135 (comment)

[dan-zeman]

Yet another candidate would be to rename VerbForm=Trans to VerbForm=Advp (adverbial participle), see also #214

[spyysalo]

Closing as there is no recent activity and the v2 guidelines are now being published. Please consider opening a new issue with reference to the new guidelines and this discussion if there are open questions relating to this issue.