Double Passives in Hebrew, Norwegian, and Danish

The last time I reported on double passives, it was to say that I’d learned they existed in Turkish as well as in English. For those new to the conversation, this post gives an overview of double passives in English. Now I’ve learned of a few other languages with double passives.

He Ordered the Tapes to Be Destroyed

I watched some of the news this morning, and saw correspondent Andrea Mitchell talking about the illegally erased torture videotapes at the CIA. I was very interested to hear if anyone has been arrested for this outrage, or at the very least fired. Needless to say, I’m still waiting. The first line Mitchell spoke was about some arrogant bastard (not her words) in the CIA who had ordered the destruction. I didn’t catch the name, though I’m guessing it was Jose Rodriguez. Anyway, she said:

[Whoever it was] ordered the tapes to be destroyed.

When she said that, I pictured someone standing in front of a stack of videotapes and barking out, “Attention, all you videotapes! This is an order! Be destroyed!”

Double Passives, in English and Turkish

Back in 2004, I first noticed sentences like these:

Despite intense curiosity, the plot of Gary Trotter and the Deathly Marshmallows was managed to be kept a secret almost until its release date.

Unfortunately, one bookstore’s copies were neglected to be locked away, and an employee posted lots of spoilers on her MySpace page.

The unusual property of sentences like these is that not one but two verbs are put in the passive voice. You can’t say the plot “managed to be kept secret”, because it sounds like the plot is an animate thing, capable of managing to do things. Similarly for the books neglected to be locked away, which implies that books are animate. On the other hand, you can’t say the plot “was managed to keep secret” or that the books “were neglected to lock away”, because those phrasings just aren’t English.

A Right-Node Wrapping; a Backformation; and a Double Passive Gone Wrong

Here are a few recently observed examples of things that I’ve talked about on numerous other occasions.

First, here’s one more right-node wrapping (aka “Friends in Low Places” coordination), from Monday’s episode of Fresh Air, in which Terry Gross interviews Dr. Melinda Merck, author of book on forensic veterinary medicine. Terry asks about one case:

What was her story, like why was she collecting so many cats and then either killing or allowing them to die? (13.23-13.30)

And also on the subject of veterinary medicine, here’s a backformation I heard at the vet’s office earlier today:

…and here’s his rabie tag; you’ll need to put that on him…

Rabies is a borrowing from Latin; in Latin, it’s a fifth declension noun, and -es is the nominative singular ending, not a plural marker. But in English, rabies has occasionally been interpreted as a plural noun. If it’s a plural noun in your lexicon, then you’ll need to strip off the -s to make it singular in order to form compounds such as rabie tag and rabie shot.

Lastly, here’s an attempt at a double passive that Glen noticed and brought to my attention. It may be that sentences such as The marshmallows were forgotten to be brought (meaning, “Someone forgot to bring the marshmallows”) are ungrammatical in your English. They’re not grammatical in mine, though it would be convenient if they were. But even though they’re not grammatical for me, they don’t quite sound like errors, either. This, though, sounds like an error:

“A lot of guys I know, actually, have become radicalized, or initially took the first steps towards learning more about Islam and their way of life as a result of them being tried to being forced to marry someone they don’t want to marry,” Butt tells Simon. (link)

It would have been better (though still not quite grammatical for me) if he’d said being tried to be forced. As for tried to being, not only is it not in my grammar, I’d bet it’s not in Butt’s grammar either.

It Was Never Said Anything About

Last month, I said in one of my posts that it sounded like Ira Glass, host of “This American Life”, had a uvular /l/. Justin “Semantic Compositions” Busch decided to hear for himself, and after doing so commented, “I can convince myself that I hear the uvular nasal when Ira Glass says his name at the 25:48 mark in the 1/5/07 broadcast, but most of the tokens of his /l/ don’t trigger that sensation for me at all.”

Since that time I’ve listened to a lot more of the weekly podcasts and archived MP3s (they’re somewhat addictive, even though they’re not all equally interesting), and I’m sticking with my call. The uvular /l/ is most perceptible at the beginning of words and in word-initial consonant clusters, not quite so much so intervocalically (between vowels), and hardly at all word-finally. If, like Busch, you want to hear some of these uvular /l/s for yourself, you can browse episodes to listen to here.

One of the more interesting episodes is “Family Legend”. As a bonus,

Richard Lederer on Double Passives

While driving to pick up Adam from school, I caught part of Fred Andrle’s Open Line program on the radio today. The guest was a language professional, not the lexicographer they had that other time, but none other than Richard Lederer, author of Anguished English, which is the source of a lot of email-propagated language humor (usually presented without any credit given to Lederer). Student writing errors, malapropisms, quotations from church newsletters and other sources with humorous ambiguities: If you’ve ever been forwarded lists of items like these, or (back in the old days) seen them as fifth-generation photocopies on office doors, you’ve probably read Lederer’s stuff. On the program, in between calls from listeners, he was plugging a new edition of Anguished English and his latest book on grammar, which the station was giving copies of to donors who pledged $100.

So anyway, I was listening to Lederer talking with a couple of callers about pronoun case forms, and another caller about some malapropisms, and I decided I’d phone in to see what he had to say about double passives. I listened for the phone number, then dialed it on my cell phone as I sat in the school parking lot.

They answered right away. “Thank you for supporting WOSU, may I take your pledge?”

“Oh, sorry, wrong number,” I said. How embarrassing; I wish people would just hurry up and pledge so this kind of thing wouldn’t happen to me. I listened again for the right number, and tried again. This time I got through.

Using the example of:

• I made the kids’ lunch.
• The kids’ lunch was made.
• I forgot to make the kids’ lunch.
• The kids’ lunch was forgotten to be made

I asked Lederer if he’d noticed this kind of passive and had any comments on it. Did Lederer…

…observe that this kind of passive is not such a recent development, being attested in the writings of David Hume, Samuel Johnson, Charles Darwin, and Horace Walpole?

…note that there’s really no other way to turn the kids’ lunch into the subject without a lot of circumlocution?

…point out that while not a typical passive, this passive is no more unusual than passives such as John was rumored to have sent overly friendly emails?

…go into a lecture about how one should Avoid Passive?

…assert that lunch was forgotten to be made made no sense?

…equate use of the passive voice with moral laxity of those who ought to be taking responsibility and saying, “I forgot to make the kids’ lunch”?

No, no, and no; and yes, yes, and yes. To be fair, he qualified the injunction against the passive, saying to avoid it “when you can,” and his advice in the book may be more nuanced. You can hear the podcast on Windows Media for probably another week or so by going here and scrolling down to the 11:00 October 17 show; my exchange with Lederer (with a lot more y’knows and ums than I’d have imagined) is from 44.34 to 46.59.

Subject and Object Gaps in Coordinated Relative Clauses

Last year, I wrote about reading Doug a book I’d read when I was his age and held onto all these years. At that time I found an unusual usage of the word enjoy where I’d have expected suffer from. Now I’m reading the same book aloud to Adam, with Doug listening in and keeping his spoilers to himself. And what do you know–I’ve found another linguistically interesting quotation in the book. Here it is:

In the another corner they’d found a creeper, which [Tubby had left behind], and [was particularly helpful].
(Clifford B. Hicks, Alvin’s Swap Shop, p. 32)

It’s another coordination of relative clauses in which one is missing an object (Tubby had left    ) and one is missing a subject (    was particularly helpful).

Another Circumstantial Passive?

Doug thought it was the coolest thing when one of the onions in our pantry sprouted. He wanted to plant it. “We won’t have to buy any more onions at the grocery store,” he said. I’m not sure what I thought would happen if we planted it. Since onions are root vegetables, I couldn’t expect this onion to produce a little onion bush with onions hanging from its branches. But I just said, “Sure, OK,” and planted the onion in a small pot. For the next week, the sprouting stalks grew taller, breaking off here and there when the cats nibbled on them; the whole thing smelled more and more oniony; and about once a day my wife would ask what Doug and I were planning on doing with that onion.

When the weekend came, the leaves were all starting to wilt, and the onion could be smelled from across the kitchen. That’s when my wife said,

That will have to be done something with today.

Doug’s Circumstantial Passive

In researching the double passive in English, I’ve been reading a few articles on Malagasy, which has a similar construction. I’ve learned that Malagasy not only has a double passive, but that it actually has two kinds of passive voice, an ordinary one and one called the circumstantial passive. I’ll illustrate with examples adapted from Paul Law’s 1995 article “On grammatical relations in Malagasy control structures” (in the book Grammatical Relations, edited by Clifford S. Burgess, et al.). First, there’s a sentence in the active voice:

hanasa        ny   lamba   amin’  ity    savony ity    Rasoa
wash.ACT  the clothes  with    this  soap     this  Rasoa
‘Rasoa will wash the clothes with this soap’

In Malagasy, the subject comes last, as seen with the placement of Rasoa above. Now we’ll do an ordinary passive, with the direct object ‘the clothes’ becoming the subject (and therefore appearing at the end of the sentence):

sasana-dRasoa              amin’  ity    savony ity    ny   lamba
wash.PASS-by-Rasoa  with    this  soap     this  the  clothes
‘The clothes are washed with this soap by Rasoa’

Now what if you wanted to make ‘this soap’ the subject? In English, you can’t. It’s not just that ‘this soap’ is the object of a preposition instead of a direct object: Sentences like This bed has been slept in or We were fired upon are quite common. But for some reason it just doesn’t work when the verb takes a direct object as well as a prepositional phrase. You end up with something weird like This soap was washed-the-clothes-with by Rasoa. For this soap to be the subject, you have to do a major workaround, something like This soap was used by Rasoa to wash the clothes. In Malagasy, though, it’s not a problem. You just have to have the right tool, and that tool is the circumstantial passive. Use the circumstantial passive form of ‘wash’, and then ‘this soap’ can go right into the subject position:

anasana-dRasoa           ny   lamba    amin’  ity    savony ity
wash.CIRC-by-Rasoa  the  clothes   with    this  soap    this
‘This soap is washed-the-clothes-with by Rasoa’

I was happy to find out about this kind of passive voice, not just because it was an interesting detail to learn about another language, but because now I have a name for something Doug said about three years ago. He was looking for a packet of some gumdrop-like snacks in the shape of characters from Scooby-Doo. (They’re called, rather misleadingly, Scooby Snacks, even though they don’t look or–I assume–taste anything like the doggy treats that Scooby and Shaggy love so well.) He found several empty bags that someone else had inconsiderately put back in the box, but finally found an intact one, and said:

This one hasn’t been eaten-any-Scooby-Snacks-out-of!

It was so jarring and just plain wrong, and yet so sensible at the same time, that I had to write it down. I don’t think Doug’s grammar will generate sentences like this one anymore, but now I know that at one point in time, Doug’s emerging English grammar was equipped with circumstantial passive functionality.

Double Your Passive: Update

Shortly after I wrote that entry on what I called the double passive, it occurred to me to do another Google search, this time for my freshly minted term instead of stuff like “+passive +linguistics” or “+passive +infinitive”. And lo and behold, this double passive has been written about, by people who independently came up with the same name for it as I did. I was interested to learn that the double passive is common in Malagasy. However, most of what I found was not from the linguistic literature, but from works on usage. For example, the American Heritage Book of English Usage says:

You may sometimes find it desirable to conjoin a passive verb form with a passive infinitive, as in The building is scheduled to be demolished next week and The piece was originally intended to be played on the harpsichord. These sentences are perfectly acceptable. But itճ easy for things to go wrong in these double passive constructions…. [D]ouble passives often sound ungrammatical, as this example shows: The fall in the value of the Yen was attempted to be stopped by the Central Bank. How can you tell an acceptable double passive from an unacceptable one? If you can change the first verb into an active one, making the original subject its object, while keeping the passive infinitive, the original sentence is acceptable. Thus you can say The city has scheduled the building to be demolished next week and The composer originally intended the piece to be played on the harpsichord. But you cannot make similar changes in the other sentence. You cannot say The Central Bank attempted the fall in the value of the Yen to be stopped.

This quotation divides the examples into good double passives and bad ones. I make the same division, except that I call their good double passives “ordinary passives with verbs that take a direct object and an infinitive,” since they can be generated by the very same rule that allows the direct object of any transitive verb to become the subject in a passive sentence. I reserve the term double passive for what they call the bad double passives, since those can’t be generated by the same rule. Even so, the two passives look an awful lot alike, and it was sometimes tricky to tell them apart when I was doing my corpus-searching late at night. In fact, I think it’s no coincidence that the two are so similar (an analysis that I’m still working out).

The other development since the earlier posting is that there have been some interesting comments. One is from rafael caetano, who offers:

the Torah, by Orthodox Jews held to be recorded in the time of Moses 3,300 years ago

This is a good example of what the usage manual calls a good double passive and what I call an ordinary passive. Notice hold in this sense takes a direct object plus an infinitive (as in “hold these truths to be self-evident”), so the passive sentence can be put in the active:

Orthodox Jews hold the Torah to be recorded…

Other interesting comments come a reader named Estel, who found a sterling literary example for me:

I stumbled across the double-passive construction twice in the historical novel I’ve just finished reading, Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian. The first example is “I believe I could tell him anything that can even be attempted to be measured, except perhaps for the new mainyard, and I shall measure that with my tape before dinner.” Unfortunately I’ve lost the place of the second example.

This one fits the pattern, with even the same verb (attempted)as in my first-noticed example.

The trickiest cases of all are those where the verb optionally takes a direct object, for example, expect. The example below is ambiguous between the ordinary passive and double passive readings:

Kim was expected to be whacked.

(Paraphrase for ordinary passive reading) They expected Kim to be whacked, or, They expected someone to whack Kim.

(Paraphrase for double passive reading): They expected to whack Kim.