Re: OT: Mildy OT: "Freedom kiss"?

Tim May wrote:
> Just out of interest, what about those phrasings was supposed to be
> particularly Australian?  (I find them fine, although I'd probably
> insert "themselves" after "establish" in the second example.)
'Another Australian characteristic is the passiveless passive:
"tax-assessments issue", "interest rates reduce", "courses offer at
universities"[*] and "patients or their symptons present at their
doctors' surgeries": passive in meaning, but not in expression. To give
two recent examples from ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corp., the
government-owned broadcasting corp, like the BBC] news programs, "People
weren't involved in trade during the war" and "The cost structure is
making it very difficult for businesses to establish there". It is not
that Australians are trying to avoid saying who did something, rather,
many verbs which must be passive for such contexts in other types of
English need not be so in Australian English, even in a formal
situation.' (From an article called 'Strine' by David and Maya Bradley,
but I don't know what it was in or where it's from.)

*: this one seems to be ungramatical to me. I would prefer 'courses
offered at universities'. Perhaps in more context, it'd be okay, but
like that, it certainly isn't.

Tristan.

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