The Korean(-American) passive "himself"?

[Joel S. Berson]

At 4/20/2007 09:49 AM, Laurence Horn wrote [comments interspersed]:
>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.

It was, of course, not the passive but the "himself" that I was,
perhaps humorlessly, suggesting was now extended from the
stereotypically Irish and being either applied to Koreans or used by Hispanics.

>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.

I don't think a sentence that begins "Mr. Cho's eruption of violence"
and that after the non-essential (? "relative") clause "in which ..."
continues "was never directly signaled by his actions or words" is
about the victims.

>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.

True.  It was not the speaker but the reporter who was avoiding
assigning responsibility.

Joel

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