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#79177 08/29/02 01:28 PM
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Faldage Offline OP
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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 08/29/02 01:35 PM
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Clarification, please: by "dictionary form" do you mean the three principal parts?


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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 08/30/02 11:35 AM
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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 08/30/02 12:44 PM
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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 08/31/02 08:27 PM
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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 09/01/02 12:05 PM
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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 09/02/02 11:29 AM
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he shined the light through the window
I'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 09/02/02 11:56 AM
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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 09/02/02 01:07 PM
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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.



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