"resurfaced"

[Marc Velasco]

My guesses:

original:
[the issue of] Barack Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers has resurfaced...

edited:
(because we're in blogland/journalism, we like active verbs, those passive
verbs simply won't do; and since we have active verbs we need to make sure
we have actual subjects, so a quick re-write without thinking yields this:)

Since the McCain campaign has resurfaced the matter of
Barack Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers...

Are actual spin-head pundits (ab)using this verbally on-air?




On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 10:40 AM, Arnold M. Zwicky
<zwicky at csli.stanford.edu>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Fwd: "resurfaced"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> > From: "Ann Burlingham"
> > Date: October 8, 2008 10:49:02 AM PDT
> > To: "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu>
> > Subject: "resurfaced"
> >
> >
> http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2008/10/abcs_jake_tapper_tries_to_pin.html
> >
> > "NASHVILLE--Since the McCain campaign has resurfaced the matter of
> > Barack Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers--the former terrorist now
> > Chicago education professor---there are some matters I am curious
> > about."
>
> awkward causativization, to my ear.  the matter of Obama's
> relationship to Ayers has resurfaced.  the McCain campaign caused
> this.  so: X resurfaces Y 'X causes Y to resurface'.
>
> i haven't given any serious thought to the matter (and i'm sure
> there's literature on it), but it seems to me that "resurface" is
> semantically inappropriate for causativization.  "reappear" and
> "arise" are similarly bad, but "resurface" has the additional problem
> of interference from transitive "resurface" 'put a new surface on'.
>
> arnold
>
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