mat@linus.UUCP (Michael A. Turniansky) (02/13/84)
<mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa>
It appears that I forgot to appease the line-eater, causing my
message to be munged.....here it is in its entirity:
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I have mused about the following concept. Take a look at the
following sentence:
John Smith failed his Science class.
Note that it makes a difference whether John is the teacher of the
class, or merely a student. In the first case, "failed" is active: in the
second case, it is passive (or something like that.). For a more striking
example, how about a course of study where one class graded another class as
a unit? Then we have "Mr Smith's class failed Ms. Jones' class." Which
ones are the graders, and which the "gradees"?
Verbs which exhibit this behavior, I term "bi-directional verbs".
So far, I have only discovered the one. Care to post more examples?
"Missing positives" have been known and talked about for more than an
ordinate amount of time. The subject, while ane, is also winding down.
This is a new class to think about.
--Mike Turniansky
(linus!mat Usenet)
(mat@Mitre-Bedford ARPAnet)swatt@ittvax.UUCP (Alan S. Watt) (02/14/84)
Actually, even withing academia, there are several more which suggest themselves from your original example of "John failed his science class". One is "to pass", as in "John passed his science class". Another is "to graduate", as in "John graduated his science class", although this one strains common usage more. I was always taught that only institutions "graduate" in the active voice, individuals "are graduated", but I suspect this usage has slipped. If you have an O.E.D. handy, (I don't), you might check to see if "fail" and "pass" were under a similar distinction in earlier days.
richard@boulder.UUCP (Richard Byrd) (02/17/84)
What you call bidirectional verbs seem to verbs which are ambiguous as to the relation between subject and object. Here are a few more examples: rent "I rented a boat," could mean I paid money to use a boat or that I let someone use my boat in return for money. "Lease" has the same ambiguity. By contrast we have the pairs "buy-sell" and "borrow-lend" which avoid the ambiguity as to who is doing what to whom. marry You have to go by the context. "Rev. Jones married John and Jane." differs from "Brigham Young married Jane and Joan." Here again it would be useful to have two different words. learn "She learned me how to read" is not standard English but is common in some areas.
dinitz@uicsl.UUCP (02/18/84)
#R:linus:-70300:uicsl:8600042:000:3278 uicsl!dinitz Feb 17 11:12:00 1984 I assume you are discounting trivial relations of "fail" such as "pass." For starters, there is the famous: The chicken is ready to eat. Is the chicken the diner or the dinner here? Here are some (untested) heuristics for discovering further examples: 1. Find verbs with at least one transitive sense which allow both animate subjects AND animate objects. 2. Find a subject/object pair (or just one if you intend to leave one implicit, as in the above example) that make sense in both transpositions of the sentence. 3. The simple past form of an active verb often doubles as passive, allowing both readings in a cleverly constructed sentence. 4. An embedded infinitive may have a similar effect. Perhaps, one reason for the alleged rarity of this type of verb is that some verbs which satisfy (1) take on a cooperative-reflexive meaning. This tends to happen with communication verbs like "correspond with," "talk with," and "argued with." For example, in: Ursala corresponded with Clive. They both end up doing the corresponding. We start searching for cases where the tail might reasonably wag the dog, and we end up with cases where the tail and the dog wag each other. This phenomenon looks rather ordinary when incorporated into the form of the first example above: The champion is ready to wrestle. The ambiguity is disguised because in a wrestling match, each participant is simultaneously wrestling and being wrestled. Guideline (1) may be circumvented in cases where a verb has multiple senses and the sentence exploits that fact. E.g.: The clock is ready to strike. Are we about to hear chimes, or witness a clock smashing contest? The Xerox machine is ready to copy. Is the machine operational to copy documents, or have we learned enough to build a look-alike machine that will compete with it in the office machine market? The ball is ready to roll. Will it roll by itself if we let it, or must we actively roll it. Similarly, The bell is ready to ring. Is it going to ring by itself, or wait until someone hits it with a mallet. Note the role that the word "ready" plays in these examples. Other words may destroy the passive reading, as in: The chicken is about to eat. The clock is about to strike. The champion is about to wrestle. The chicken is going to eat. The chicken is waiting to eat. (May be ambiguous in some ideolects) The chicken is anxious to eat. The chicken is fixin' to eat. Or they may destroy the active reading, as in: The chicken is perfect to eat. The chicken is fixed to eat. (May be ambiguous in some Ideolects) "Ready" seems to emphasize the ambiguity of the infinitive. Does anyone know other words that act similarly? (Yes, I know that some of those words are not adjectives but rather verbs. That isn't the point.) There are other forms besides the infinitive which behave this way with "ready." E.g.: President Marcos is ready for the execution. Will he be in the grandstand while his opponent is executed, or is being brought to the firing squad after some new dictator has risen to power? Notice that the verb has become a noun! But the noun describes an event, and there is an ambiguity as to how Marcos fits into that event. -Rick Dinitz