Trespassed update
« previous post |
I'm at a motel in Nampa, Idaho.
A sign posted on a side entrance reads:
DO NOT LEAVE DOOR
OPEN YOU WILL BE
TRESPASSED.
I asked the manager what she meant by that.
She replied, "You will be prohibited from coming on this property."
In our previous discussions of this usage, I do not recall that the grammatical property of "causative" came up. Coming from Chinese, where causative verbs are common, I would think of this expression, "You will be trespassed" as a sort of causative passive.
Compare Mandarin "bèi zìshā 被自殺" ("be suicided"), "bèi shīzōng 被失蹤" ("be disappeared"), and so forth.
A similar causative-passive construction is also to be found in Japanese:
Watashi wa sensei ni shukudai o dasaseraremashita.
私は先生に宿題を出させられました。 (わたしはせんせいにしゅくだいをださせられました。
"I was made to submit my homework by the teacher."
(source)
A lively discussion with vivid examples in many languages:
"Suicided: the adversative passive as a form of active resistance" (3/24/10)
Analytically, it may seem hard to wrap one's head around a grammatical construction that is simultaneously passive and causative, but such constructions do occur, e.g., "be defenestrated" (see "Translating the untranslatable" [10/28/10], comment 9).
Selected readings
- "Passed" (10/14/24)
- "Thou shalt be trespassed, as it were" (4/27/24)
- "You will be trespassed automatically" (8/1/23)
- "Not permission, to violate to punish" (5/8/14)
Michael Carasik said,
October 15, 2024 @ 8:05 am
Hebrew has a binyan (conjugation) for the passive causative: Hophal.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
October 15, 2024 @ 10:00 am
"Suicide" is a funny word (no, really!). Do you think there may be a taboo involved?
I'm no etymologist (can't even tell a wasp from a hornet, in fact), but Wiktionary tells me that the progression went:
kh₂eyd (PIE "hew") –> kaidō (Pr.It. "hew") –> cīdium (Lat. "murder").
But nobody thought to prefix the genitive reflexive pronoun to make "suīcīdium" until the ENGLISH did it with "suicide", and then gave it back to the Italians. When they got it, they refused to recognize the verb as reflexive, and adopted it as "suicidarsi", now bookending the overburdened word with reflexivity at both ends with the suffixing of the Italian reflexive pronoun! And to top off the weirdness, Italian already has "uccidere" (to kill) in its lexicon!
Cervantes said,
October 15, 2024 @ 10:23 am
In the criminal justice system (Dah Dah!) if someone fails to observe terms of probation or parole, their PO is said to "violate" them. They'll say, "I got violated and sent back to jail." Same idea as this use of trespass. The word for the offense becomes the word for the consequence.
Dagon said,
October 15, 2024 @ 11:01 am
"Trespass", in the hospitality industry, at least, is a transitive verb that means "to formally inform someone that they are barred from the property and will be charged with the crime of trespass should they return". Sometimes expanded as "read the trespass act to …".
It is distinct from the act of trespassing, which is performed by the violator. To trespass someone is performed by the police or the property management ON a violator.
Joe said,
October 15, 2024 @ 11:04 am
Nerdview: not just for nerds!