Do we mean syntactic or semantic diminutives?

[jmccrae]

I was looking at the diminutive relation and it does not seem clear to me when to apply it.

For example, the German "Mädchen" (girl) is a syntactic diminutive of "Magd" (maid) by the addition of then (regular) -chen suffix, but does not mean 'little maid'. In contrast, 'cottage' is a small 'house' in English (as defined by PWN) but these words have no morphological relation.

Currently, the definition (below) suggests that we are only dealing with semantic diminutives.

A concept used to refer to generally smaller members of a class

However, allowing the relationship between senses (which also contradicts them being a kind of hyponym) suggests that we do in fact care about the morphological process. I also suspect that most users want this to be able to record the addition of regular suffixes to nouns with this property. I would suggest that we instead consider this as a kind of derivation and allow it only between senses, so that we capture the change properly (I also guess this is why the definition above uses 'generally')

Alternatively, we could allow this relationship to be ambiguous and represent hyponymy and/or derivation

This probably also applies to the other subtypes of hyponymy (feminine, masculine, young form and augmentative)

[goodmami]

I see the need for a distinction, but maybe we can just say that diminutive / augmentitive / etc. between senses is syntactic, and between synsets is semantic? We would therefore need to ensure the documentation here is clear about which to use. This also means that the relations would appear twice in the documentation, once under hyponym and again under derivation. We could link to the other so we're up-front about the apparent duplication.

[jmccrae]

I could live with this solution, although it creates an ambiguity that would be better solved with two distinct relation names (diminutive and diminutive_form for example).