Finished Folding

Not too long ago, we were picking up the house to get ready for some company. (OK, not literally picking up the house, but you knew that, right?) My wife laid out the agenda for the boys and me, pointing out Legos and library books on the living room floor, clutter on the kitchen counter, and a full laundry basket on the bed. As she pointed to that last item, she said:

This needs to be finished folding.

My syntax sensors started tingling. What had set them off?

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).

Funky Winkerbean Explains the Passive Voice

Les Moore of Funky Winkerbean. This is one English teacher whose students are going to know less about English when they finish his class than when they started:

Let’s see: “Active voice sentences are those in which your subject, verb, and direct object follow directly along behind each other.” OK, first of all, how can two things be behind each other? All right, if two people stand back to back, I guess they would be behind each other, but how does this apply to words? Let’s call the beginning of the sentence the front; then in a sentence such as She eats the chips, She is in front, eats follows behind She, and the chips follows behind eats. Which two words are behind each other? Second, what if the sentence doesn’t have a direct object, as in They laughed?

Next: “Passive voice sentences turn the order around, placing the object first and the subject last.” Pity poor lovestruck Darin if he tries to follow this rule…

“So the passive of She eats the chips would be The chips eats she? What did you say, Mr. Moore? Eats needs to agree with the chips? But I thought you said verbs always had to agree with their subjects, and she is the subject, right? Uh, whatever. OK, so it would be The chips eat she, right? Why not? The chips are eaten by her? Hey, you never said I had to do stuff to the verb! And if she isn’t the subject, is it the direct object after all, just like in an active voice sentence? Does it still count as a direct object if you put in a by?”

And what will Mr. Moore’s students make of sentences like, The chips were eaten, with no subject (or direct object, whatever) at all? Oh, well, at least the cartoonist didn’t have him calling it the passive tense.

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.