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So I was going to retag a question with when I noticed it didn't have a wiki, so I thought I'd write one. When I did some double checking, it turns out that there is a linguistic meaning to redundancy that I hadn't considered.

I thought we would use it for questions like "Is 'access to' redundant here?" because we get quite a few of them, but I don't want to confuse those with questions about semantic repetition. I know it would be unlikely that a learner would choose that tag on their own, but that doesn't mean it would be a useful tag for someone to apply later.

If we're going to use for the linguistic sense, what would be a good tag to use for the "double word" questions that aren't reduplication questions? Duplication?

As a side note, it would be really helpful if folks wrote a quick tag wiki when they create a tag that has a linguistic definition so that it is less likely to get misapplied. As it stands right now, I'm not certain if a learner created this tag because it was the best word they knew for their question, or if it was created to mean the redundancy in the linquistics sense and it got appropriated for "Do I have too many 'thats' in this sentence?" questions.

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    I mean, it should pretty obviously say "this is the tag wiki for the redundancy tag".
    – Dan Bron
    Mar 18, 2016 at 15:27
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    @DanBron Lol. I was thinking "This tag is for questions tagged with the redundancy tag."
    – ColleenV
    Mar 18, 2016 at 17:09
  • Colleen I'd appreciate it if you be more clear about what you perceive redundancy to be and what the linguistic definition is. I have only a single definition in mind and this confuses me.
    – M.A.R.
    Mar 19, 2016 at 17:45
  • @IͶΔ I wasn't familiar with the linguistic sense of redundancy that I came across when I Googled redundancy - I've linked the Wikipedia page. The questions that are tagged with the redundancy tag are mostly about duplicate words, while the linguistic term is about repeated information/meaning (semantics). I'm asking the folks that have been here longer than I have if there was any intention for the redundancy tag to be the linguistic definition. I don't care one way or the other really, but it should have a wiki clarifying which sense it's being used for.
    – ColleenV
    Mar 20, 2016 at 0:10

1 Answer 1

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If no-one objects, I'm just going to write the tag wiki to reflect that types of questions it has already been used to tag. I think some linguistic term tags are less useful here on ELL because we don't get many questions from learners that fall into those categories, so it would be best to stick with the interpretation that folks have already applied to the tag.

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    If you like, drop something in the drafting zone first.
    – Nathan Tuggy
    Mar 20, 2016 at 15:43
  • Tags are descriptive of questions, and tag wikis are descriptive of tags, so this makes perfect sense to me :). I'm interested in the difference between redundancy and linguistic redundancy... Yay, something to add to the million other things I need to read! lol
    – WendiKidd
    Apr 3, 2016 at 8:49

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