The Korean(-American) passive "himself"?

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:26 AM -0400 4/20/07, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>On April 9 Wilson Gray wrote:
>>Sants pruh-zarve us! How soon they forget! When I was a kid in the
>>'Forties, this use of "-self" in cartoons, comics, movies, and on
>>radio shows to indicate that someone was Irish was as common as the
>>use of "gwine" to show that someone was black. Stereotypical
>>Irishwomen always referred to their husbands as "himself," for example.
>
>>From The New York Times, Wed. April 18, New England Final, 1/3, by
>Manny Fernandez and Marc Santora:
>
>"Mr. Cho's eruption of violence, in which 32 victims and himself were
>killed on the Virginia Tech campus here in a rampage of gunfire, was
>never directly signaled by his actions or words ... ".
>
>This construction is certainly awkward.  Was Cho killed by someone
>else, such as a police officer?  Were the other 32 killed by someone
>else?  Aha, the passive, which lets the columnists avoid assigning
>responsibility for the killings.
>
>The responsibility for the "himself" must rest with the authors, so
>perhaps it has become Hispanic-American.
>
>(There is an obvious alternative, which I know I saw and probably in
>the very same newspaper:  "in which he killed 32 victims and then
>himself on the Virginia Tech campus ...".)
>
Nothing particularly Korean or Spanish about the use of the passive
construction here.  One motivation for using the passive rather than
the active alternative you propose might have been to present the
victims as topic of the sentence while demoting the salience of the
agent--the sentence as published, awkward as it may be, is about the
victims and his effect on them, while your alternative is more
centrally about Cho and his action.  More prescriptively correct
would have been "...in which 32 victims and he were killed...", but
that has its own awkwardness.  News reports and official
pronouncements are certainly fond of the deferred-responsibility
passive ("Mistakes were made"), but given the context, the parallel
isn't exact.

LH

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