[Ads-l] Fwd: Re: [ADS-L] Intransitive "publish"

Thu Oct 11 19:37:48 UTC 2018

This, too, seems to have been sent only to Mark, so I'm re-sending it.

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	Re: [ADS-L] Intransitive "publish"
Date: 	Wed, 10 Oct 2018 20:17:23 -0400
From: 	Neal Whitman <nwhitman at ameritech.net>
To: 	Mark Mandel <mark.a.mandel at GMAIL.COM>

Here’s the book:

Hundt, Marianne. English Mediopassive Constructions : A Cognitive, 
Corpus-Based Study of their Origin, Spread, and Current Status. 58 Vol. 
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Print.

Also, from the conclusion of the GG piece, several other episodic 
examples found in the wild, all within the space of one day:

Once you start thinking about the middle voice in English, you’ll start 
to notice it everywhere. In fact, and this is a true story, in a single 
day while I was writing this script, I noticed two of them in a magazine 
article about the airline industry. One sentence said that deregulation 
“made it easier for new carriers to launch,” with the patient “new 
carriers” as its subject. The other said that the galleys were the 
places “where we enter and exit the plane, [and] where the drink carts 
stow.” The drink carts don’t stow themselves; the flight attendants stow 
them. Mere hours later, an air-conditioner technician told me as he 
wrote up the paperwork for a service call, “The bill will be sending 
this week.” A couple more hours later, I downloaded some updated 
software for a handheld device, and a message on my screen said, “Your 
file is downloading.” The instructions I was following said that once I 
selected the downloaded file, “Your software will install automatically.”

Neal

On Oct 10, 2018, at 7:49 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU 
<mailto:laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>> wrote:

> But doesn’t middle voice tend to involve dispositions/capacities 
> rather than episodic or eventive clauses?  Compare standard middle 
> examples from the literature like
>
> Poetry doesn’t translate easily.
> This bread will cut with a sharp knife.
> Those cars are selling like hotcakes.
> Bean curd digests easily.
> The soup that eats like a meal.
> ‘Mr. Howard amuses easy' (as in the eponymous paper representing 
> earliest treatment of the construction I know of, by Anna Granville 
> Hatcher (Modern Language Notes, 1943—a paper that also uses asterisks 
> for ungrammatical sentences!)
>
> Typically, there’s an adverb relating to *manner* (not time) and a 
> general, non-episodic, interpretation (cf. #Mr. Howard amused last 
> night).  In the case of “This book published last night”, we have an 
> episodic interpretation involving a one-time event.  So I’m not sure I 
> see it as a garden-variety middle.
>
> LH
>
>>
>> https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/middle-voice-sentences
>>
>> Neal
>>
>>> On Oct 10, 2018, at 3:54 PM, Marc Sacks <msacksg at GMAIL.COM 
>>> <mailto:msacksg at GMAIL.COM>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I don't think any of these examples matches the one I cited, though 
>>> maybe
>>> the 1972 entry comes close.
>>>
>>> I read the " The newspapers do not publish on Good
>>> Friday" example more like "The network does not broadcast after 
>>> midnight."
>>>
>>> And "This just published" is like "This just in."
>>>
>>> I don't see "the book published last month" in quite that way. Maybe 
>>> it's
>>> middle voice, like "the book reads well"?
>>>
>>> --Marc
>>>
>>>> On Wed, Oct 10, 2018 at 3:00 PM Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at gmail.com 
>>>> <mailto:bgzimmer at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>>> -----------------------
>>>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU 
>>>> <mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>>
>>>> Poster:       Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM 
>>>> <mailto:bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM>>
>>>> Subject:      Re: Intransitive "publish"
>>>>
>>>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>
>>>> Intransitive "publish" is pretty common these days. OED3 breaks it down
>>>> into two senses: 3c (of an author, as in "publish or perish") and 
>>>> 3d (of a
>>>> work -- as Vox uses it). Examples for the latter sense date back to 
>>>> 1849:
>>>>
>>>> 1849   Times 13 Aug. 10/2 (advt.)    Amusement while 
>>>> travelling--Publishing
>>>> monthly, one shilling each, the Railway Library.
>>>> 1918   C. S. Lewis Let. 27 Oct. (1966) 45   He [sc. Heinemann] told 
>>>> me that
>>>> John Galsworthy (who publishes with them) had seen my MS.
>>>> 1928   Public Opinion 6 Apr. 325/1   The newspapers do not publish 
>>>> on Good
>>>> Friday.
>>>> 1972   Evening Telegram (St. John's, Newfoundland) 24 June 1/1   The
>>>> Evening Telegram will publish Monday, June 26 which is being 
>>>> observed as
>>>> Discovery Day in Newfoundland.
>>>>
>>>> I'd say the intransitive usage has been further popularized in the 
>>>> age of
>>>> online publishing. Among journalists you typically hear things like 
>>>> "this
>>>> just published" (i.e., just appeared online via publishing 
>>>> software), or if
>>>> you're in a hurry, "this just pubbed."
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> On Wed, Oct 10, 2018 at 2:49 PM Marc Sacks <msacksg at gmail.com 
>>>>> <mailto:msacksg at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> I just encountered this in a "Vox" article:
>>>>>
>>>>> Enterprising Southern women have been trading on this platonic 
>>>>> ideal of a
>>>>> lifestyle forever. The latest is Reese Witherspoon, whose book 
>>>>> *Whiskey
>>>> in
>>>>> a Teacup*
>>>>> <
>>>>>
>>>> https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWhiskey-Teacup-Reese-Witherspoon%2Fdp%2F1471166228
>>>>>>
>>>>> published last month.
>>>>>
>>>>> Shouldn't that be "was published," or is it perhaps 
>>>>> self-published? Has
>>>> any
>>>>> of you encountered the transitive "publish" elsewhere? It's new to me.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
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>>>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>>>
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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