Trespassed update

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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



25 Comments »

  1. Michael Carasik said,

    October 15, 2024 @ 8:05 am

    Hebrew has a binyan (conjugation) for the passive causative: Hophal.

  2. 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!

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. Joe said,

    October 15, 2024 @ 11:04 am

    Nerdview: not just for nerds!

  6. edith said,

    October 15, 2024 @ 2:34 pm

    > Cervantes: violated

    The same construction is used in the UK prison system, but the word in use is "breached".

    "I'm back in because I got breached by probation"

    In case citation is required:
    https://insidetime.org/mailbag/approved-premises-useless-for-preventing-crime/
    https://insidetime.org/mailbag/the-long-wait-for-courses/

  7. Chris Button said,

    October 15, 2024 @ 3:49 pm

    dasaseraremashita

    A lovely example of a complex Japanese verb. The root form is "dasu"

  8. Jonathan Smith said,

    October 15, 2024 @ 8:57 pm

    The Japanese is the passive of a causative in the technical sense that Japanese verbs inflect… in Mandarin and other Chinese they don't of course but we can still conceive of parallel stacking of say rang4 or jiao4 'make/let/cause…' outside of bei4 'suffer/be faced with…' to yield e.g. (from the interwebs) 我女儿[…]被让去看心理医生 "My daughter was made/asked to go and see a psychiatrist."

    The black humor of 被自杀 "be suicided" etc. relates to its ungrammaticality — following the above rules we get instead say the unclever 被叫[去]自杀 "be made/asked to [go] commit suicide."

  9. Phoenix Moore said,

    October 15, 2024 @ 10:52 pm

    Dr. Mair,
    I cannot but hold you in yet higher esteem,
    because I would not be able to restrain myself from following up, I would not be able to keep a straight face.
    Is there an uglier sinograph than 飞 ?

  10. Kim said,

    October 16, 2024 @ 4:06 am

    Along with 'violated' as Cervantes points out, it's a usage that I think is very heavily class-based. I'm guessing that most Language Log readers are very unlikely to either trespass anyone or to be trespassed, or ever have a discussion about it — except as an intellectual curiosity.

  11. Michael Albert said,

    October 16, 2024 @ 5:08 am

    My feeling is that this is, if not quite common, then standard in the UK/Australian/NZ sphere. See for example:

    https://communitylaw.org.nz/community-law-manual/chapter-4-activism/protests-and-the-general-criminal-law/trespass/

    It's certainly something one hears in the news or sees in the newspapers with a fair degree of regularity in NZ.

  12. Laurentio said,

    October 16, 2024 @ 1:24 pm

    “You will be trespassed”: The shorthand verbs that point at legal and administrative procedures seem mainly to be used in a passive form, and the focus is on the object (who is subjected to the procedure) of the verb. To the verbs mentioned one can add (British) “section” (being admitted to a psychiatric institution), “breathalyze,” “polygraph,” or Dutch “verbaliseren” (being interrogated for official written record, i.e. “proces-verbaal”). These verbs present individuals as passive objects vis-à-vis imposing institutions, but in reality provoke insubordinate humor: If somebody threatens to “trespass,” “section,” “breach,” or “verbalize” you, the natural reaction is to poke fun at the gap between the inept, self-important verb and its literal meaning. Or isn't it?

    The Chinese term 被雙規 bèi shuāngguī (being dual-tracked; subject to criminal and disciplinary investigation at the same time) at a first glance looks like such a passive shorthand term of bureaucratic jargon. But its context of “being disappeared” and “being suicided” suggests that the boundary between fun and fatalistic sarcasm is hard to pin-point. Those being silently disappeared into diverse forms of detention and those jumping from tall buildings under duress include both rich/powerful and poor/powerless people. The passive form is suggestive of power that cannot be named.

    Sorry for just stating the too obvious.

  13. David Marjanović said,

    October 16, 2024 @ 1:35 pm

    Is there an uglier sinograph than 飞 ?

    I'm very surprised anyone would think that one is ugly…

  14. Phoenix Moore said,

    October 16, 2024 @ 2:49 pm

    It's not symmetrical, like so many of them, and its components are not even balanced in terms of their distribution in the square space, if it were to be carved, it would fall over flat, and even then, rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise, it would remain the black sheep. It is the 347th most common Chinese character, and, scrolling that far down the list, I couldn't find one nearly as off-kilter.

  15. Philip Taylor said,

    October 17, 2024 @ 7:32 am

    "I'm very surprised anyone would think that [飞] is ugly…" — I am staggered that anyone would not !

  16. Benjamin E. Orsatti said,

    October 17, 2024 @ 7:44 am

    Seriously, guys; you're dealing with hardest writing system in the world, and you're complaining about a character that _does_ sort of look like what it means? Kinda looks like a hummingbird to me, see?:

    花 飞

  17. Philip Taylor said,

    October 17, 2024 @ 9:05 am

    Yes, but I don't expect hanzi to "look like what [they] mean" — I expect them to look like beautiful abstract collections of elegant strokes, harmoniously arranged to fit perfectly in a unit square (e.g., https://gwongzaukungfu.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Escritura-Estandar.jpg) …

  18. Benjamin E. Orsatti said,

    October 17, 2024 @ 9:17 am

    Ah, hanzi isn't difficult enough for you, eh? Here, try this one on, and get back to me once you've committed it to memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangut_script

    [Tangut] is remarkable for being written in one of the most inconvenient of all scripts, a collection of nearly 5,800 characters of the same kind as Chinese characters but rather more complicated; very few are made up of as few as four strokes and most are made up of a good many more, in some cases nearly twenty… There are few recognizable indications of sound and meaning in the constituent parts of a character, and in some cases characters which differ from one another only in minor details of shape or by one or two strokes have completely different sounds and meanings.

  19. Lasius said,

    October 17, 2024 @ 9:35 am

    That sign reminded me of the translated Owoc phrases from the novel "Mother of Demons", by the late Eric Flint.

    Examples:

    death not end
    give
    life not life

    or

    must not waste
    root
    wrong there reeds

  20. Philip Taylor said,

    October 17, 2024 @ 9:58 am

    Anyhow, "death" doesn't "like like what it means", any more than does "soul" or "i>impasse" or "schadenfreude", so why should "媽" (or "爸", or "飞") be any different ?

  21. Philip Taylor said,

    October 17, 2024 @ 10:01 am

    (or even "look like", or "impasse" — the preceding were typed with the benefit of a real 1391406 keyboard, so I can offer no excuses whatsoever …).

  22. Victor Mair said,

    October 17, 2024 @ 10:41 am

    David Marjanović: "I'm very surprised anyone would think that one is ugly…"

    I'm not. In fact, I was going to say exactly the same thing as Phoenix Moore did about its lack of balance and symmetry.

  23. Josh E. said,

    October 18, 2024 @ 9:09 am

    I have heard this sense of "trespassed" in spoken English once before while watching a blackjack player being told by the pit boss that their action was no longer welcome at the table.

  24. David Marjanović said,

    October 19, 2024 @ 6:09 am

    Kinda looks like a hummingbird to me, see?

    Yes, and that was done deliberately as part of the simplification. But of course that's unrelated to whether anyone finds it ugly.

    There are few recognizable indications of sound and meaning in the constituent parts of a character

    Tangut characters with related meanings do tend to share elements – but it's not a comparatively simple system like Chinese radicals, it's much more abstract. The script was supposed to be learnable in a matter of months; I maintain it remains the most wrong-headed decision ever.

  25. Chris Button said,

    October 19, 2024 @ 4:55 pm

    Yes, and that was done deliberately as part of the simplification

    Hmm… that seems rather unlikely!

    Personally I prefer the stacked variant with two 飞. There is also one with 去 underneath. It definitely lacks balance otherwise.

    Seriously, guys; you're dealing with hardest writing system in the world …

    It's child's play when compared to learning how to read Japanese.

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