The Korean(-American) passive "himself"?

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Apr 20, 2007, at 6:49 AM, Larry Horn wrote:

> 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.

my analysis as well.

>   More prescriptively correct
> would have been "...in which 32 victims and he were killed...", but
> that has its own awkwardness.

yes, lots of people find
   NP and PersonalPronoun
awkward in general (in objects as well as subjects), because it has a
weighty, full NP followed by a light, short pronoun.  their instinct
is to improve things by giving more substance to the pronoun, by
choosing a reflexive.  this is one of those cases where neither
alternative is really satisfactory; one is prosodically
uncomfortable, the other is non-standard.  reordering the NP and the
pronoun is sometimes a solution, but that foregrounds the referent of
the pronoun (treating the referent of the NP as viewed as subsidiary
to the referent of the pronoun), and in the case at hand ("in which
he and 32 victims were killed"), also suggests that the killings
happened in the order Cho first, then the victims, and neither of
these consequences is desirable.  (in subjects, if the pronoun is 1st
person, the reordering produces the "impolite"
   I and NP
which means that people are inclined to go for
   NP and myself
if the speaker is to be backgrounded, or
   myself and NP
if the speaker is to be foregrounded.  i have a pile of examples of
both.)

arnold

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