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In the past couple of years I've noticed a new trend in younger generations of native English speakers, at least in American English and Australian English. But I can't find it discussed anywhere on the internet yet, not in linguistics papers, not in correct usage sites, not in language blogs.

The change is in certain verbs used in the passive being replaced by the verb used in the intransitive.

The most common verb where this change is happening is "to release" when pertaining to media, software, and technology. But several other verbs are undergoing the same change on a smaller scale.

Some made up examples:

  • "the games are being released" → "the games release"
  • "when the building is completed" → "when the building completes"
  • "the movie will be released" → "the movie will release"

My question is, are there some resources where this is being discussed? Especially any linguistics papers or studies?

Also, would these new senses be a kind of ergative? They make an inanimate object the subjects of verbs they are more normally objects of.

UPDATE:

It's been pointed out to me that English verbs used to have a form called the passival which fits the pattern I describe except that the passival was restricted in use to the progressive while this new trend seems to occur in all tenses and forms of the verb. (More links: 1, 2, 3)

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I'll add some real examples here:

Sir Cornflakes
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hippietrail
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    Not an answer, but this sounds like continuing the trend of other English verbs? E.g., the door was opened vs. the door opened. Also found this example from Google books (1889): "The room measures 28,830 cubic feet, or 576 cubic feet per head." – jick Jul 14 '20 at 06:45
  • @jick: I'm not sure. It's very common for English verbs to have both transitive and intransitive senses of the same verb. But the rise of this new construction is not something I've noticed before as a middle aged native English speaking language enthusiast. – hippietrail Jul 14 '20 at 09:52
  • Not a native speaker, but "when the building completes" seems more acceptable to me because I then take "building" as a participle instead of a noun - just to say that this should be taken care of when analyzing the data; for the other two examples this obviously isn't a problem. – Keelan Jul 14 '20 at 11:13
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    Another example that still jars to me (even though I know it’s standard in the industry and thus use it myself) is “the book publishes on 15 August”. I wouldn’t call this ergative, though – it’s simply causative alternation being applied to verbs we’re not used to see causatively alternate. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 14 '20 at 12:56
  • @Keelan: Oh that was just a pseudo example I made up after seeing an Australian reporter in a YouTube video use it. I didn't realize my example had two interpretations. I'll find the video. There is at least a third verb that I now can't think of, I think one also used in tech and media. – hippietrail Jul 14 '20 at 14:15
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    A cursory Google search seems to confirm your intuitions: "the movie will release" has only one hit before 2001, but increases greatly over the following years. (A search for "the games release" is tainted by misspellings for "the game's release"; the earliest results for "when the building completes" are either transitive or gerunds as Keelan took it) – b a Jul 14 '20 at 14:15
  • @ba: Try it with other verb forms or with modals or with a singular noun, etc. – hippietrail Jul 14 '20 at 14:17
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    Perhaps "inchoative" or "anti-causative" might be good terms, following George Lakoff's discussion in his dissertation "Irregularity in Syntax". Compare "The physicist melts the metal/The metal melts" with "The studio releases the movie/The movie releases". – Greg Lee Jul 15 '20 at 20:38
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    I'm with Janus. This is causative alternation, or could be described as these verbs becoming labile, especially as the examples you cite (complete, especially so) fall neatly into the change-of-state category. – Circeus Jul 16 '20 at 02:22
  • @GregLee: Yes it definitely seems to me to be a case of several new verbs acquiring usage paradigms that have long existed for other verbs, it's not an entirely new thing out of the blue. But I wonder how recently this last happened to an English verb. – hippietrail Jul 16 '20 at 03:33
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    In light of the comments above I think it's worth asking what drives this process in relation to particular verbs. I often have the impression these days that people are avoiding phrasal verbs, and if you take away the option of "the film is coming out" that's probably going to push you towards "the film releases". As for when it last happened, "completion" is used to refer to the final stage of property transactions, at which legal title to the property is transferred, so you get e.g. "that transaction never completed". I don't think that goes back centuries but it's not super recent either. – rchivers Jul 16 '20 at 18:42
  • @rchivers: People have been avoiding writing phrasal verbs as two orthographic verbs more and more in recent years. A few days ago I heard a native English speaker use one of these in a new regularized past form for the first time. An MMA YouTuber used a form like "takedowned" or "knockouted" in speech. I was flabbergasted. Other influences on "the film releases" must be "the file premieres" and "the film debuts", which are probably both rarer as passives. – hippietrail Jul 17 '20 at 00:30
  • @hippietrail Interesting. This is a trend I hadn’t seen or noticed at all, treating phrasal verbs as simplices. I have to say, though, that knockouted sounds fine to me, and does not mean the same thing as knocked out. To me at least, the latter just refers to any trauma to the head resulting in loss of consciousness (“he was knocked out by the baseball that hit him”), or to leaving a competition due to losing a game (“knocked out in the quarterfinals”), whereas knockouted specifically refers to winning a boxing match by knockout. You can knockout someone by knocking them out. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 17 '20 at 21:42
  • @JanusBahsJacquet: It's not just phrasal verbs. All phrases that also pass spellcheck as a single word are now dominant spellings in the younger generations even if the single word form has a different part of speech or sense. "Every day" is now "everyday", but phrasal verbs are large part of the group. I don't think the word I actually heard was "knockouted" though that does not sound acceptable to me. It was in the context of UFC/MMA commentary though. To me, a 52 year old native Australian English speaker winning a boxing match is only "knocked out". Check some lexicography for a surprise. – hippietrail Jul 18 '20 at 03:40
  • I've just added a new example from American English found on Youtube using "to generate. Wiktionary does include an intransitive sense and Websters says it with an intransitive sense is a synonym of "to propagate" meaning "to multiply sexually or asexually". Whether this is a novel sense/usage or reviving an old one I still think it's part of this current phenomenon. – hippietrail Jul 24 '20 at 04:16
  • Wherever there's an inchoative, there's likely to be a corresponding causative waiting to be used. When it's railroading time, you make railroads. – jlawler Jul 30 '20 at 21:24
  • English was always a bit imprecise in this regard, e.g. to walk the dog, no reflexive… – Adam Bittlingmayer Dec 31 '22 at 12:30
  • @AdamBittlingmayer But I think there's a difference between a set of uses of a verb including both, which English obviously has, vs arbitrary free choice of patterns on all verbs, vs some verbs gaining new patterns or shifting from an old pattern to a new pattern. English surely doesn't have the second, perhaps some languages do? This question attempts to focus on the third case, which seems to happen in English sometimes under some conditions but is maybe not well explored in the literature? – hippietrail Jan 01 '23 at 06:02
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    @hippietrail From the examples given, it actually seems restricted to a few specific verbs and domains. And such niche phenomena arise too often to be covered. – Adam Bittlingmayer Jan 01 '23 at 07:44

1 Answers1

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Are there studies where this is being discussed? Would these new senses be ergative?

This is not a complete answer, but I hope it can help someone to take a few steps farther as well.

As to merely if it is a real phenomenon that right now, a higher number of passive verbs are switching to what appears to me to be something like an active, stative verb,

HISTORICAL COCA is the only large corpus of English that has extensive data from the entire period of the last 30 years – 20 million words per year from 1990-2019 (with the same genre balance year by year). This means that in addition to seeing variation by genre, you can also map out recent changes in English in ways that are not possible with any other corpus – such as with the frequency of awesome from 1990-2019,.

https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/help/coca2020_overview.pdf

this could be a corpus you could search syntactically for passive verbs, and maybe write a script to lemmatize them (get the lemma of it), then search for verbs that are just forms / inflections of those lemmas, and maybe try to see at least informally which words seem to be to undergoing the shift, and why, ie, what commonality the words may have, explaining this phenomenon. I’m going to assume there’s some way to search a corpus for a specific syntactic matching form, but for now I just have this info on some ways of searching in COCA https://www.coquery.org/doc/userguide/syntax.html .

You could try to observe how common this phenomenon is or isn’t, over various points in the past; or, if your hypothesis were simply that it’s becoming more common to use ergative verbs in English, for no reason, you could still ask a testable question like why some languages start to shift towards becoming more ergative overall; and if there is some cross-linguistic tendency for forms requiring multiple words to find single-word variants over time, maybe simply because it’s easier to say, then.

Some materials about how and/or why ergativity evolves, how it gets started, might be:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causative_alternation

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labile_verb

https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:200811/FULLTEXT01.pd

This at least reminded me of the idea of how and why verbs in any language shift towards and become ergative; since presumably they may have all got started in a certain way (or not), and we’re just seeing that in English in certain ways right now but it’s nothing new. So, how do “antipassives” get “grammaticalized”? I don’t know if it’s referring to the same thing but it might give you some terminology to search elsewhere, further with https://www.academia.edu/1802279/The_Grammaticalization_of_Antipassives .

There’s an entire handbook on ergativity which could be good https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37094/chapter-abstract/323330077?redirectedFrom=fulltext , maybe this chapter: “Intransitivity and the Development of Ergative Alignment” https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37094/chapter-abstract/323334008?redirectedFrom=fulltext .

And this is an analysis of the different types of ergativity: https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00118.x

And here’s a huge bibliography about the concept of ergativity in general:

https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199772810/obo-9780199772810-0132.xml

Perhaps I or someone else can follow up with having searched a corpus for more sturdy evidence demonstrating that this phenomenon exists and is unusual, i.e. that it is not just unremarkable that passives would be shifting to ergatives at any given time, in a language; and to understand better what historical patterns may have been observed, as to why a language might tend in this or a similar direction.

Julius Hamilton
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