participles in the NYT Mag

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 1:30 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> In the first paragraph of a letter to the editor in this weekend's
> NYT Magazine,
> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25letters-t-THEETHICISTO_LETTERS.html,
> a writer offers the following grammatical argument against the use of
> "transgendered":
> =============
> We transgender people are not "transgendered," a word that makes it
> sound like something has happened to us, rather than reflecting
> something we innately are. You wouldn't say someone was "gayed" or
> "homosexualed." Only verbs are transformed into participles by adding
> "-ed," and "transgender" is an adjective, not a verb.
>
> The issue brought up by your questioner is a ticklish one for us: the
> ignorance of the general population as to what transgender people are
> like (hint: just like everybody else, with an important difference,
> much like gay people) makes us hesitant to out ourselves right off
> the bat (unless the object of the date is a purely sexual one),
> because it tends to distract others from seeing us as real people, as
> opposed to god-knows-what sort of stereotype. The idea that we are
> trying to deceive anyone is as ridiculous as it is offensive: you do
> not start out trying to fool someone that you have an interest in
> getting to know better. As you rightly point out, you don't blurt out
> everything on a first date.
> BRIDGET SMITH
> San Francisco
> ============
>
> The problem is that the claim that "only verbs are transformed into
> participles by adding '-ed'" is untenable, as decades of studies on
> participial formations have shown.  There are, for example,
> "un-passives" where there is no extant corresponding verb (or no
> relevant one); to say that Antarctica is uninhabited is not to
> presuppose that someone (maybe penguins?) first managed to  uninhabit
> that continent.  There are adjectives like "blue-eyed", "one-armed",
> and such with no corresponding verbs.  Even in the case under
> discussion, it's true that there's no relevant verb "to transgender",
> but then if we speak of someone as highly sexed, there's no
> suggestion that someone first (highly?) sexed them; similarly for
> "oversexed", "undersexed", "differently-abled",...  "Gendered" itself
> is used in a lot of formations with no obvious verb source:  gendered
> language/ space/institutions/media...
>
> I remember an old paper...let's see, yes, it's
>
> Hirtle, W. H. (1970). "-ed Adjectives Like 'Verandahed' and
> 'Blue-eyed'." Journal of Linguistics 6. 19-36.
>
> ...that treats some of these cases. One interesting property is the
> need in many cases for modification:  "blue-eyed", "one-eyed", even
> "two-eyed" (in a contrastive context) are all fine, but "eyed"
> doesn't seem to occur with the same (possessive, non-verbal) sense;
> similarly "legged", "haired", "breasted",... (These are worse than
> Gricean pragmatics alone would predict.)
[snip]

Well, as they say, love is a many-gendered thing.


--bgz

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