Quote:

The trailers for a drama set in what appears to be one of the penal colonies in Australia are playing continuously on one of the international TV channels here. The voiceover starts "At a time when freedom was deprived ....".

Now, certainly one can be deprived of freedom, but what can freedom be deprived of? Or is this idiomatic in the Southern reaches of the English language?



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.