Should the "nouns/verbs/adjectives" tags only be used for general discussions?

Question

Currently, we use verbs, nouns and adjectives for questions on specific verbs, nouns and adjectives, e.g:

• Was ist das Präteritum von "darben"? -- verbs
• Grammatisch oder grammatikalisch? -- adjectives
• Eifersucht vs. Neid -- nouns

I believe that this usage is not useful. The purpose of tags is to make it easier to search questions, and I can't imagine anyone wanting to browse through all questions on specific nouns.

These tags have a better use, which is to mark general discussions on those lexical classes. Some good examples are:

• What is the origin of the rules about the capitalization of the first letter of each noun? -- nouns
• Verb inversion with adverbs used at the beginning -- verbs

I suggest that we do not use these tags for marking questions on specific words, but keep marking general discussions.

Answer 1

I am opposed to this suggestion. Sure, it's hard to imagine anyone following/ignoring a certain part-of-speech tag all by itself. However, where these tags really shine is precisely in "making it easier to search questions" by combining them with other tags.

Given enough time, we will have thousands upon thousands of questions in each of the major categories word-choice, word-order, meaning, grammaticality, single-word-requests, and so on. So it will become increasingly hard to find a particular (kind of) question(s) in any of those categories unless you can think of some other tags it must be tagged with. Part-of-speech tags are prime candidates for helping you do just that: narrow down your search.

For example, if you are interested in learning more about where adverbs go relative to verbs, it makes perfect sense to want to look at questions tagged word-order+verbs+adverbs. Sifting through the entire word-order tag by hand simply won't cut it.

Most importantly though, if a question is about a verb, it is about a verb. So tagging it with verbs makes perfect sense and certainly cannot be considered wrong. If anything, we have a problem with people using too few tags on their questions rather than too many. (Which will become even more of an issue as the site matures.)