Trespassed update

I'm at a motel in Nampa, Idaho.

A sign posted on a side entrance reads:

DO NOT LEAVE DOOR

OPEN YOU WILL BE

TRESPASSED.

I asked the manager what she meant by that.

She replied, "You will be prohibited from coming on this property."

In our previous discussions of this usage, I do not recall that the grammatical property of "causative" came up.  Coming from Chinese, where causative verbs are common, I would think of this expression, "You will be trespassed" as a sort of causative passive.

Compare Mandarin "bèi zìshā 被自殺" ("be suicided"), "bèi shīzōng 被失蹤" ("be disappeared"), and so forth.

A similar causative-passive construction is also to be found in Japanese:

Watashi wa sensei ni shukudai o dasaseraremashita.

私は先生に宿題を出させられました。 (わたしはせんせいにしゅくだいをださせられました。

"I was made to submit my homework by the teacher."

(source)

A lively discussion with vivid examples in many languages:

"Suicided: the adversative passive as a form of active resistance" (3/24/10)

Analytically, it may seem hard to wrap one's head around a grammatical construction that is simultaneously passive and causative, but such constructions do occur, e.g., "be defenestrated" (see "Translating the untranslatable" [10/28/10], comment 9).

 

Selected readings

• "Passed" (10/14/24)
• "Thou shalt be trespassed, as it were" (4/27/24)
• "You will be trespassed automatically" (8/1/23)
• "Not permission, to violate to punish" (5/8/14)