Quote:

I would suggest it is just another case of semantic shift. Consider the structure <ADV deprived>, as in emotionally deprived, extend this to a phrase in which a noun is being used adverbially, e.g., sleep deprived, and then treat the adverbial noun as the object of the deprivation. One small step for language; one giant leap for linguistics.



But, my dear Fong, sleep deprived is not the way most people would use it. They would hyphenate, thusly, I am sleep-deprived. This is NOT using sleep as the subject of the verb deprive. Sleep-deprived is an adjective.

I am always surprised when I see the lengths to which descriptivists will go to say that something that is so plainly wrong might possibly be correct. I will grant you that the sentence that begins "At a time when freedom was deprived. . .." can be successfully interpreted, but when a reader has to stop to figure out what the author meant, then there has been a breakdown in effective communication.

I just looked at the first dozen or so on-line dictionaries that came up in onelook.com, and every one of those with a sample sentence used the word of to connect the verb deprive with the thing that was taken away. And the last one (the thirteenth) I looked at provided this:

To dispossess; to bereave; to divest; to hinder from possessing; to debar; to shut out from; -- with a remoter object , usually preceded by of. Online Plain Text English Dictionary

TEd