[Ads-l] Intransitive "publish"

Thu Oct 11 20:54:10 UTC 2018

Files download, software installs, articles publish. Digital artifacts seem
to have taken over grammatical agency these days.

On Thu, Oct 11, 2018 at 3:37 PM Neal Whitman <nwhitman at ameritech.net> wrote:

> 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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