The Korean(-American) passive "himself"?

[Benjamin Barrett]

I think the overriding concern here is the right to be presumed innocent
until found guilty in court in the US. If the reporter said that Cho did
it, then there might even be a case of libel or bad reporting at the least.

Benjamin Barrett
a cyberbreath for language life
livinglanguages.wordpress.com

Joel S. Berson wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Re: The Korean(-American) passive "himself"?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 4/20/2007 09:49 AM, Laurence Horn wrote [comments interspersed]:
>
>> At 9:26 AM -0400 4/20/07, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>>
>> 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
>
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org