transitivity of "expire" (fwd)

Mark A Mandel mam at THEWORLD.COM
Tue Feb 26 22:43:51 UTC 2002


On Tue, 26 Feb 2002, Laurence Horn wrote:

#At 9:26 PM -0700 2/25/02, Rudolph C Troike wrote:
#>I forwarded the preceding too soon -- here's the answer for the passive!
#
#Amazing!  The language keeps changing under our very eyes and ears.
#Whodathunkit?  I wonder if this involves a reanalysis of the common
#participial adjective ("driving with an expired license", etc.) as a
#passive rather than perfect form, which allows it to be reconstructed
#as "X has been expired" rather than "X has expired"?  Curiously, the
#only relevant (transitive) "expire" the OED lists is obsolete--

I've actually wondered about that usage ("driving with an expired
license"), since the perfect participle is normally passive in English.
How common and productive is this usage? Is it found mostly in fixed
expressions like that?

-- Mark A. Mandel



More information about the Ads-l mailing list