[Sigia-l] verbs in labels

[Livia Labate]

> Peter VanDijck:
: Does anyone have thoughts or references about using verbs
: throughout in labels? Like: "Adjust Personal Data" instead
: of "Personal Data". Does anyone know of a product/site
: that has attempted that?

One problem I can see depends on wether your target audience is a native
speaker of English or if English is a second/third language.

I just finished a course on the Semantics of the English language (so I
could create better labels!) and my conclusion is (as Cynthia mentioned)
that nouns (and adverbs) are more easily learned than verbs (for ESL folks),
but the main problem is the use of collocations (groups of words that convey
a meaning different from the meanings of the individual words).

In your example, "change personal data" is a collocation (something commonly
used), while "adjust personal data" is not. My suggestion is, if you decide
to use verbs, analyse wether or not they are coolocational and if their use
makes sense for all. Here's a good place to do that:

Corpus Concordance Sampler
http://titania.cobuild.collins.co.uk/form.html

By the way, if anyone is interested in this subject, I wrote my final paper
on colocations and corpus concordance analysis based on the Sigia-L list,
using the archives as the corpus to verify the existence of collocations.
Contact me off list about this and I'll show you a sample.

Livia Labate
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