Re: "Kill" vs. "cause to die" (was: "Transferral" verb form...)

John Cowan writes:
 > So I think the natural thing in the Friday-Sunday scenario is to say
 > that the victim was killed on Friday, since that is when the cause of
 > his dying occurred, even though the death itself didn't happen until
 > Sunday.
 >
 > This may even be primarily a PP-attachment problem:  "caused (to die
 > on Sunday)" vs. "(caused to die) on Sunday", a species of trouble which
 > English is just full of.
 >
That's certainly how I'd look at it.

As far as LC-01 (which sparked this thread) is concerned, if you need
to refer to the causation and the life-cessation seperately, you can't
use a causative conjugation, you'll have to use a seperate verb "to
cause" as in English.  Causative-cessative-live therefore generally
matches up pretty well with "kill" - I'm not sure if it can be used in
the sense "killed on Friday and caused to die on Sunday", but this
sounds odd even in English, so it's not likely to come up except in
deliberate wordplay.  I think I'll sat thit it can, that any locative
oblique arguments to a causative apply to the causation and not
necessarily to the effect.

 > However, there is also the fact that I can cause your death without
 > killing you: in a hypothetical case that first-year law students
 > (in anglophone countries) think about, if I shout on a mountain and
 > cause an avalanche whereby a village is buried, I will not be said
 > to have killed the people in the village.

Well, this may be the way these words are used in court, and in legal
documents, but I think you would be able to say you killed them in
non-formal speech.  After all, you can say Stalin killed millions,
even though he didn't do it directly; and you can say that a driver
killed a pedestrian in an accident, even though it wasn't deliberate.
It might be considered misleading, but not technically inaccurate.

Reply