Language Log

When does stopping start?

Sign on a Stanford campus cafe near my office:


I think this one's clear, though I had to think for a moment.  But suppose it had said


Is that version clear?


The first, actually posted, version says that Olives will be closed on the 17th and for some period thereafter, though for a moment I entertained the possibility that the period of closure would begin at the end of the business day on the 17th (rather than the beginning of the day); this chooses the purely stative (or "false passive") interpretation of "will be closed" ('will be in a closed state'), rather than the true passive interpretation ('someone will close it'), though my moment of indecision was triggered by the possibility that "will be closed" involves the passive of the causative verb close. 

For me, an end-of-day closure is the most natural interpretation of the second version, which has the inchoative ('coming into being') verb close.  If it's advertised that some store is going out of business and will close on March 17th, the interpretation is that the store will be open on the 17th, but will close at the end of that business day and will not re-open.

(A contribution of context and background knowledge: actually, Olives closed at the end of its business day on Friday the 14th.  But it's NEVER open on weekends.  So Monday was the first day it was closed when it might have been expected to be open.)

Now, a much clearer version would have been something like


(which is understood with pure-stative "will be closed").

The question of when stopping starts comes up in other contexts.  Some years ago I called the circulation department of the Columbus (OH) Dispatch, to stop delivery of the paper while Jacques and I were in California, and, wary of the verb stop, I explained my wishes by saying


which I thought should have been clear enough to a speaker of English.  But no.  The woman immediately asked me


I explained that I wanted to get a paper on the 15th, but not on the 16th or thereafter.  But she merely repeated her question exactly as before.  We went back and forth a few more times, concluding with my saying that surely she understood what I wanted, and that she should describe that on the internal forms in whatever way the system required.  She was incredibly reluctant to do that; she tried to insist that I actually utter the words


which I wasn't willing to do, because that sentence seemed unclear to me, as a speaker of ordinary English (rather than the English of the forms she was working with), as to when on the 16th delivery of the paper would be ordered stopped.  It's the beginning-of-day vs. end-of-day thing.

She started threatening to refuse to take my stop order when I started threatening to speak to her supervisor.  We parted inamicably, but the last paper did come on the 15th.

Posted by Arnold Zwicky at March 19, 2008 08:09 PM