#79177
08/29/2002 1:28 PM
|
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
Jackie's post about self-raising vs. self-rising flour and pay raises vs. pay rises got me thinking about this whole subject, which has been touched on before.
Rise and raise are examples of a whole class of pairs of similar verbs in which one verb is transitive and regular and the other intransitive and irregular. They come in three types which we can categorize as follows:
Type A) Verbs which are identical in the dictionary form. Examples: hang, shine.
Type 2) Verbs in which the dictionary form of the transitive is in the form of the past tense of the intransitive. Examples: lie/lay, fall/fell.
Type Þ) Verbs in which the transitive and intransitive dictionary forms are similar but do not meet the criteria of either Type A or Type 2. Example: rise/raise.
My intent here is, in general, to examine the nature of these verbs and, in particular, to discuss the terms self-r(a)ising and pay r(a)ise in terms of what we determine about the class of verbs in general.
One thing that immediately came to mind is that in verbs of Type A, the distinction between transitive/regular and intransitive/irregular has become somewhat muddied. This is evident in the usages associated with the example verbs. In particular, the verb hang is frequently encountered in the irregular even in transitive senses unless the object is a condemned human being.
Note: I would appreciate it if people could resist the urge to enter posts which do nothing to advance the intended subject of the thread but rather are merely vehicles for gratuitous puns or other word play. If you must post along these lines, please do so in Word Play and Fun.
|
|
|
#79178
08/29/2002 1:35 PM
|
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 6,511
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 6,511 |
Clarification, please: by "dictionary form" do you mean the three principal parts?
|
|
|
#79179
08/29/2002 1:41 PM
|
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
The dictionary form would be the bare infinitive, that is, the infinitve without the preceding to. Example: the dictionary form of the verb that might be said to be rise, rose, risen, rising would be simply rise. This is the form under which I would find the word if I were looking it up in the dictionary.
|
|
|
#79180
08/30/2002 11:35 AM
|
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 11,613
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 11,613 |
Er...I hate to admit my lack of full comprehension here, Faldage, but would you mind giving my feeble brain some examples of each of your three types? Thanks.
|
|
|
#79181
08/30/2002 12:44 PM
|
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
examples of each of your three types?
Hang and shine. For the type A shine, for example, we would say he shined the light through the window in the transitive, but the light shone through the window in the intransitive. For type 2 we have the ongoing complaints about lay being used where lie would be correct. "Lay down on the couch if you're feeling ill", I told my sweet ASp. "That's 'lie down on the couch'", she wittiily quipped in return, a glowering look in her eye. But right now, it's the type Þ one, rise/raise, that particularly interests me, with this whole self-raising vs. self-rising flour/pay raise vs. pay rise thang. Since they're both transitive concepts it would seem that raise would be correct in both instances. All I remember right now is that USns say pay raise but I don't remember which of us says self-raising flour.
Incidentally, what little research I've been able to do on the subject shows that shine was irregular in OE and that while rise has been with us from OE, raise came into ME from Old Norse. Raise and rise are both from the same IE root.
|
|
|
#79182
08/31/2002 8:27 PM
|
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 11,613
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 11,613 |
Ok, thank you. Couple things. First, I'm not so sure your ex. of the the verb hang fits, here. I'm talking about common usage, not "correctness". We don't say, "He hanged the sign on the door", or, "The sign hanged on the door". It hung. He hung it. Or, he did hang it.
Next--thank you for pointing out the transitive/intransitive link. That's the kind of thing I wouldn't think of on my own. Coupled with pay, rise and raise are nouns, interestingly. And with self-, they become adjectives, though they're treated grammatically as verbs...I think.
Hmm...my pay rises, it doesn't raise. Self-r. flour causes bread to rise; it raises the dough while it's baking. Grammatically, it seems more correct to me to say pay rise, and self-rising flour.
Rise and raise can both be nouns, as used here. Maybe we say raise for an increase in salary ("I got a raise".) to differentiate by context from "I got a rise out of him". Funny--I absolutely canNOT stop a sentence at "I got a rise"; I HAVE to add the rest of the phrase.
Maybe we say pay raise to match the transitive "My boss raised my salary". We certainly wouldn't say "My boss rose my salary". Would anyone who would say "I got a pay rise" please post what you would say in place of raised, in "My boss raised my salary"? I'd be really interested to see.
|
|
|
#79183
09/01/2002 12:05 PM
|
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
my pay rises
Not all by itself it doesn't. Your boss raises it. The flour raises itself. The flour and the pay rise because some(one/thing) raises them. As for the hang thang, it's not so much a question of what is "correct" as it is what has been in the past and the fact that with type A verbs of this class, we seem to be erratic at best in this transtive/regular intransitive/irregular thang. I've started reading Michael Crichton's Timeline and he uses shone in a transitive sense somewhere right near the beginning. There are some cases where we just don't use it wrong. Nobody ever says "I shone my shoes", for example.
I have added sit/set/seat to my list of type Þ verbs, but haven't done into any research on them yet.
|
|
|
#79184
09/02/2002 11:29 AM
|
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 1,346
veteran
|
|
veteran
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 1,346 |
he shined the light through the windowI'd say he shone the light through the window. Nonetheless - He shined his shoes while the sun shone. Brits would get a pay- rise. We wouldn't really talk about someone raising our pay, but we definitely wouldn't talk about someone rising our pay (we'd probably just say "The boss gave us a pay-rise"). We use self- raising flour to bake cakes. This is apparently distinct from the Zildian as well as the OverThePondian "self- rising" flour (can't remember if it was Tweedledum or Tweedledee that mentioned this  ). A cake would rise. Again, we'd rarely - if ever - talk about someone raising it, but we'd never talk about someone rising it. Pick a different example. A flag is raised. If there were some device that would make the flag raise automatically on the right occasions, it would be a self- raising flag. We could noun the event of the flag rising by calling it a flag- rise, taking sunrise as the model. However, could it be significant that the self-raising flag hasn't been invented yet, whereas the sun is always self-raising? 
|
|
|
#79185
09/02/2002 11:56 AM
|
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
taking sunrise as the model
Interesting you should bring up sunrise. In my research I hit upon sit/set as another case of a type Þ verb, except in this case they are both irregular and, although sit is largely intransitive and set is largely transitive a hen can either sit or set on her eggs and the sun always sets; it never sits. I'm beginning to think that this correspondence of intransitive/irregular and transitive/regular is either coincidental or something that was added to the language later than Old English. For example, scinan, the OE for shine was always irregular. Also, the irregluar rise, is from OE risan, also irregular, but the regular raise is a Middle English addition from Old Norse and may have been taken as regular because it came in during the time when these old forms were getting lost anyway.
|
|
|
#79186
09/02/2002 1:07 PM
|
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146 |
We use self-raising flour to bake cakes. This is apparently distinct from the Zildian as well as the OverThePondian "self-rising" flour (can't remember if it was Tweedledum or Tweedledee that mentioned this ). A cake would rise. Again, we'd rarely - if ever - talk about someone raising it, but we'd never talk about someone rising it.
Tweedledum or Tweedledummer here. If this was my linguistic house of cards, I'd be considering razing it. Of course, most houses of cards are self-razing by definition.
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
|
|
|
#79187
09/02/2002 3:21 PM
|
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
in this case they are both irregular
A little more research shows that in OE, settan seems to have been regular. We perhaps think of it as being irregular because it isn't set, setted, setted but it seems the -ed got elided into the final t of set. I suspect the same of put but my AHD and my Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary are at odds as to the mere existence of the word putian, and it doesn't speak to the issue at hand anyway, so fuhgeddaboudit.
|
|
|
#79188
09/02/2002 3:30 PM
|
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 1,346
veteran
|
|
veteran
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 1,346 |
a hen can either sit or set on her eggs
A Britlish hen never sets on her eggs.
Funny, I'd never associated sunset with sitting. Are you sure that's the derivation, Fal?
"The Sun rises in the East and sets in the West"
If I said the sun "sits in the West" it would mean something completely different - merely that the sun was positioned in the western part of the sky at the time I spoke.
|
|
|
#79189
09/02/2002 8:26 PM
|
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
If I said the sun "sits in the West" it would mean something completely different
Exactly. It's not used that way. However, one normally sets something down transitively; if something sits, it's doing it on its own. When I sit in a chair I do so intransitively. I can set the book on the table, but I do it transitively. That the sun sets intransitively is an exception. It could be argued that the sun isn't setting, the horizon is coming up but I think that realization post-dates the normal usage by a few years.
|
|
|
#79190
09/02/2002 10:00 PM
|
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 1,346
veteran
|
|
veteran
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 1,346 |
" Sit yourselves down", said the host. As TweedleZildian implied, words and rules about them go very wobbly in this area. It could be argued that the sun isn't setting, the horizon is coming up but I think that realization post-dates the normal usage by a few years. Nice.
|
|
|
#79191
09/02/2002 10:14 PM
|
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
As TweedleZildian implied, words and rules about them go very wobbly in this area.
I think that's because this rule, if it indeed it ever had any value and isn't just a collection of coincidences, is no longer, as the linguists like to say, productive. The lie/lay thang is very much ignored. I was having a discussion on lie/lay on Dave Wilton's wordorigins board some time ago and a couple of the defenders of the lie/lay distinction quoted Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton saying they couldn't imagine singing "Lie, lady, lie" or "Lie down, Sally".
|
|
|
#79192
09/03/2002 5:58 AM
|
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146 |
[...quoted Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton saying they couldn't imagine singing "Lie, lady, lie" or "Lie down, Sally".
While that's no recommendation grammatically, it's a matter of what "sounds" right. And Lie, Lady, Lie probably simply wouldn't have an been acceptable wording at the time. These days, of course, the words would be much more direct ...
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
|
|
|
#79193
09/03/2002 8:48 AM
|
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 1,346
veteran
|
|
veteran
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 1,346 |
it's a matter of what "sounds" rightThat's the bottom line (especially on sitting/setting ). Of course "lie" also has a double meaning which - especially in a song - may cause confusion and/or mondegreenery. and: Lay lady, lay = lay [yourself down] lady, lay [yourself down] Lay down, Sally = Lay [yourself] down, Sally Rest you in my arms = rest you[rself] in my arms ..blah blah 
|
|
|
#79194
09/03/2002 9:31 AM
|
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
Lay lady, lay = lay [yourself down] lady, lay [yourself down]
Of course this argument could be dragged out any time this "error" is encountered. It is also used to argue that the difference between lie and lay is minimal and can be ignored. I could do the same with bring and take or (Heaven forfend) imply and infer. The point is that this usage is quite common, to the point that it is becoming correct.
|
|
|
#79195
09/03/2002 12:07 PM
|
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 6,511
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 6,511 |
or (Heaven forfend) imply and infer
Yikes!!® Forfend, indeed!
|
|
|
#79196
09/03/2002 1:04 PM
|
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,027
old hand
|
|
old hand
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,027 |
Of course "lie" also has a double meaning
This reminds me of the autobiography of the late Eric Ambler, my favorite thriller author: its title is "Here lies".
|
|
|
#79197
09/03/2002 1:21 PM
|
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
Yikes!!® Forfend, indeed!
Well, duh!. They're opposite ends of the same pipeline. If you can't figure out which end of the pipe you're at without having different words for them no wonder you have problems with lie/lay, bring/take and fewer/less.
|
|
|
#79198
09/03/2002 2:38 PM
|
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
Dear Faldage: forgive me if you have already covered this. On my walk this AM
it occuured to me that "look" and "smell" etc. can be used two ways.
"You just don't look right to me" etc. Is there a term for this?
|
|
|
#79199
09/03/2002 2:49 PM
|
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
"look" and "smell" etc. can be used two ways.
Good one, Dr. Bill. Different ends of the same pipeline. No problem understanding which is meant. I like it.
|
|
|
#79200
09/03/2002 2:57 PM
|
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 1,346
veteran
|
|
veteran
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 1,346 |
The old favourite:
"My dog has no nose."
"How does he smell?"
"Terrible!"
Boom, boom.
Note this doesn't work with eyes and look, though.
|
|
|
#79201
09/03/2002 10:15 PM
|
Joined: Aug 2001
Posts: 11,087 Likes: 2
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2001
Posts: 11,087 Likes: 2 |
"My dog has no nose."/"How does he smell?"/"Terrible!"
Note this doesn't work with eyes and look, though.
Ah, so we have just invoked a difference between "see" and "look" which doesn't have an equivalent in "smell." "Look" could do double duty this way, but that's not exactly the way we describe what the eyes do.
It's (look vs. see) not the difference between active and passive, or transitive and intransitive - does it have a name?
|
|
|
|
|
