Plummet's journey
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Yann LeCun's evaluation of political versus linguistic errors:
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His comment is no doubt meant as a joke, but it's worth exploring the usage that bothers him.
To start with, the English word plummet has already been on a long morpho-syntactic and semantic journey (like nearly all other words). It started as a noun in Old French, plommet, the diminutive of plom "lead", meaning "ball of lead, plumb bob", referring to a (typically lead) weight attached to a "plumb line". Wikipedia tells us that
The instrument has been used since at least the time of ancient Egypt to ensure that constructions are "plumb", or vertical. It is also used in surveying, to establish the nadir (opposite of zenith) with respect to gravity of a point in space.
And also, used by sailors to estimate the depth of water.
The noun plummet, under various spellings, was borrowed into English as early the 14th century, and of course was also used metaphorically, as in this example from Shackerley Marmion's 1632 play Hollands Leaguer:
And when I haue done, I'de faine see all your Artists,
Your Polititians with their Instruments
And Plummets of wit, sound the depth of mee.
And as always, the metaphorical extension got looser, to the point that the noun plummet came to be used to mean simply a "rapid fall" — though this usage seems to be relatively recent, with the OED's first citation from 1957:
1957 After his plummet from fame, Keaton became a writer. Atchison (Kansas) Daily Globe
Also, like many other English nouns, plummet was soon used as a verb — though interestingly, the OED tells us that the first uses were transitive, connected to the depth-sounding sense of the noun:
1620 This ought to be the barre, cancell and limit of our too scrutinous nature, which often will assay to plummet the fathomlesse and bottomlesse sea of Gods most secret and hidden actions. T. Walkington, Rabboni
The (now more common) intransitive use, meaning (literally or figuratively) "To drop or fall rapidly or precipitously", came a couple of hundred years later, with the OED's first citation from 1845:
1845 Our capacity for delight plummeted. N. P. Willis, Dashes at Life with Free Pencil
OK, so what about the usage that bothered Yann LeCun:
In just 52 days, Trump has started a global trade war, plummeted the stock market, fired thousands of federal workers, slashed government funding, and sparked fears of a recession.
The author of that sentence has evolved plummet following the pattern of (the English version of) the causative-inchoative alternation:
The Causative/Inchoative alternation involves pairs of verbs, one of which is causative and the other non-causative syntactically and semantically (e.g., John broke the window vs. The window broke). In its causative use, an alternating verb is used transitively and understood as externally caused. When used non-causatively, the verb is intransitive and interpreted as spontaneous.
(Note that inchoative in this context means something like "change of state", applied to the intransitive subject; and in the (transitive) causative version, the subject causes the object to the undergo the state change.)
There are many English verbs exhibiting this alternation — boil, melt, sink, open, bake, bounce, blacken, hang, close, cook, cool, dry, freeze, move, open, roll, rotate, spin, twist, shatter, thaw, thicken, whiten, widen, march, jump, …
And it's common in English to extend this pattern to create a causative transitive verb from an intransitive inchoative one, as I did with evolve in an earlier sentence (though others have done this before me…).
But attempts at such extension don't always go smoothly, and plummet is not the only example of possible failure. Thus fall is an intransitive inchoative verb, but "*Those actions are going to fall the market" doesn't work. Why?
This post is already too long, so for now I'll just direct you to Beth Levin and Malka Rapaport Hovav, "A preliminary analysis of causative verbs in English", Lingua 1994:
This paper investigates the phenomena that come under the label ‘causative alternation’ in English, as illustrated in the transitive and intransitive sentence pair Antonia broke the vase / The vase broke. Central to our analysis is a distinction between verbs which are inherently monadic and verbs which are inherently dyadic. Given this distinction, much of the relevant data is explained by distinguishing two processes that give rise to causative alternation verbs. The first, and by far more pervasive process, forms lexical detransitive verbs from certain transitive verbs with a causative meaning. The second process, which is more restricted in its scope, results in the existence of causative transitive verbs related to some intransitive verbs. Finally, this study provides further insight into the semantic underpinnings of the Unaccusativity Hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978).
Among other things, they note the difference between "verbs of manner of motion such as roll, run, jog, and bounce", which have causative counterparts, and "verbs of directed motion such as come, go, rise, and fall", which don't. You can read the paper to learn their theory of why this matters — but we can note that the intransitive verb plummet is arguably in between those categories, interpretable either way.
None of the dictionaries that I've checked have a causative-transitive sense for plummet = "cause to fall rapidly", and I don't think I've ever heard or read it — but it wouldn't be a shock to find other examples, and it's also understandable that it would trigger someone's "wrong!" reaction.
Some relevant past posts:
"Grilling, staging, and landing", 5/5/2011
"Transitive 'disappear'? Not in this country!", 12/22/2011
"Morphosyntactic innovation in the White House?", 2/15/2017
"'Cooperate him'", 5/25/2024
J.W. Brewer said,
March 18, 2025 @ 9:38 am
Via the wonders of ablaut we already have the perfectly good transitive verb "to fell," meaning "to cause to fall" and parallel to e.g. "to raise" as "to cause to rise." Unfortunately, transitive "fell" seems little used for direct objects that aren't trees but maybe still suffices to block the redeployment of intransitive "fall" as a causative?
Andreas Johansson said,
March 18, 2025 @ 10:01 am
L2 speaker here, but fwiw my immediate interpretation of "felled the stock market" would be that the stock market, as a building or institution, was somehow brought low, not that the shares traded on were reduced in value.
Gregory Kusnick said,
March 18, 2025 @ 10:23 am
In my experience, the verb used by people who fell trees for a living is "fall", not "fell"; they describe themselves as tree fallers.
I think even they, however, would find "falling the stock market" jarring, because falling a tree implies control over where and how the tree falls, whereas a falling market is uncontrolled and chaotic.
Coby said,
March 18, 2025 @ 10:39 am
If Campbell's can describe their product as "soup that eats like a meal" then anything, apparently, is possible.
Gokul Madhavan said,
March 18, 2025 @ 10:39 am
I’ve similarly noticed a modern tendency to use disappear in a causative-transitive manner, which tends to raise my hackles: For me, it’s resolutely an intransitive verb, as is plummet. (I would use the etymologically-related plumb transitively instead.)
Stephen Goranson said,
March 18, 2025 @ 10:42 am
Karoline Leavitt said something that struck me as linguistically-odd some days ago, but I don't have the will to search for it among the current torrent of nonsense.
Rodger C said,
March 18, 2025 @ 10:48 am
In my experience, to disappear started as a calque from Spanish and originally referred to the Argentine junta's practice of causing its opponents to vanish. The Spanish verb was also oddly expanded into active terrirory.
James said,
March 18, 2025 @ 11:21 am
Rodger C, yes, that's what I've always assumed, that it's derived from the desaparecidos.
Coby, professional chefs often use 'eats' that way. I hear it as parallel to the way a piano plays, and think of how garlic *smelling* pungent is completely natural (whereas the piano playing — and I don't mean a player piano! — has a kind of innovative feel to it, a bit like the Middle Voice in Latin).
Coby said,
March 18, 2025 @ 11:51 am
In those IE languages that have the simple reflexive pronouns that generally begin with S (Z in Dutch) — e.g. Romance, Slavic, and Germanic other than English and Frisian — the "inchoative" is usually formed by making a reflexive out of the "causative": romperse, ломаться, sich brechen. I wonder how those languages that don't have it do it. (Greek, for one, has an analytic passive.)
Brett said,
March 18, 2025 @ 1:49 pm
Previous discussion of transitive disappear.
[(myl) Thanks — added the link to the list at the end of the post..]
Haamu said,
March 18, 2025 @ 2:10 pm
"And deeper than did ever plummet sound" has always been a favorite line of Shakespeare. I can still recall, after 50+ years, my surprise and delight at realizing my initial reading had the noun and verb roles exactly backward.
Even better, you could say that the vowels in the four main stressed syllables mirror the content by plummeting from high to low. Shakespeare had a great sense of this. "Weary, stale, flat and unprofitable" is another fine example.
Cuconnacht said,
March 18, 2025 @ 3:54 pm
JW Brewer: fall /fell = "cause to fall" isn't ablaut; it's umlaut. The verb in proto-Germanic was *falljanan, and the j in the suffix fronted the vowel in the first syllable before the suffix was lost. The same thing happens with blood/bleed, food/feed, whole/heal, full/fell.
J.W. Brewer said,
March 18, 2025 @ 6:55 pm
1. Transitive "plumb" means something different than "cause to plummet," though. The subject is holding onto the plumb line, figuring out how deep the space in question is by how much line/rope/string needs to be let out before the plumb bob hits bottom. If you cut the line so that the plumb bob plummets irretrievably/uncontrollably to the bottom, you aren't "plumbing the depths" anymore because now you've ruined your measuring instrument.
2. Re "soup that eats like a meal," four decades ago when I was his student, Larry Horn was fascinated by pseudo-middle-voice constructions like that in English – frequently found in advertising copy (one he especially liked was something like "this sausage practically cuts itself"). I think he may have published something or other about it but I don't know if the phenomenon held his interest into more recent decades or he moved on to other things.
3. I apologize to all if I muddled up my -lauts. (Meine Laute would apparently be the German plural.)