This Sentence No Verb Rich Cochrane's Blog

I’ve been reading a fair bit of radical pedagogy (Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux etc) of late and seeing the word “emancipation” so many times that it started sticking out of the page and looking wrong. Then I read something in, of all places, Huddleston & Pullum that I think made sense of it for me.


The thing that made me curious was that the verb “emancipate” is often re-cast as an adjective, “emancipatory” and applied to all kinds of things as a term of approval: “that’s a very emancipatory practice” and so on. Or it could just become a noun, “emancipation”. I realised I didn’t always know what this meant, except that it was meant to sound good.

The word I got from Huddleston & Pullum was “ditransitive”. A ditransitive verb takes two objects. “Throw” can be ditransitive, like this:

Jane threw John the ball

Here Jane is the subject, “the one doing the verb” in schoolchildren’s terms. There are two objects: a direct object, the ball, which is being thrown and an indirect object, John, who’s having something thrown to him.

Interestingly, “throw” can also be monotransitive, meaning it takes one object:

Jane threw the ball

but it can’t be intransitive, meaning it takes none at all:

Jane threw

Now, my tiny revelation about emancipation is that we should, when we’re thinking about it seriously, always be able to associate three nouns with it: an emancipator, someone who’s emancipated (which could be the same person, of course) and something from which the latter is emancipated:

X emancipated Y from Z

We need to know who’s being emancipated and, crucially, from what. There’s no emancipation pure and simple, just like there’s no throwing without something that gets thrown. We need to know who did the emancipating, who was emancipated and what they were emancipated from.

[Note: I'm not making a grammatical point here. Technically speaking, my grammarian friends (thanks for coming), Y is not functioning as an indirect object here but as part of a prepositional phrase and in fact the verb "emancipate" doesn't even license ditransitivity. Still, I hope you can see what I'm getting at.]

This is important in political writing where some or all of these things are assumed. Freire, for instance, was working in the 1970s with peasant labourers under the military dictatorship in Brazil. His goal was democratization, in part through mass education. It’s important, in understanding what he wanted and what he was doing, to understand the three nouns that go with the verb, especially when the verb gets turned into a noun and becomes a rallying-call: Emancipation!

In fact this is an example of a general critical thinking point I’d like to make. For example, this is grammatically fine:

Jane emancipated John

but it’s only useful if we can say what it means. The truth is that without context it could mean Jane did almost anything to John. In order to be able to tell what I need the two objects rather than just one.

This may, in fact, be part of a general malaise about missing objects. The old “avoid the passive” prescription is sometimes said to be because the passive voice is “vague about agency”, which on the face of it is nonsense. This passive-voice sentence from a story in The Telegraph isn’t vague about agency at all:

Witnesses say Neda was shot by the Basij militia

Quick, who shot Neda? There, see? Easy, wasn’t it? Yet this one from the BBC is indeed vague about agency, probably out of necessity since no suspect had yet been named:

UK tourist shot dead in Texas bar

If there’s a bad guy here (aside from those doing the shooting) it’s not the passive voice but the missing noun. Once again, I’m not complaining about this on grammatical or stylistic grounds but on intellectual ones; unless some context fills me in, I can’t tell from this sentence what happened, and that’s what I want out of it. As I said, this may be valid: in the BBC example we don’t know who did the shooting yet, so we can’t say.

So it is with other missing nouns. With “emancipate” my claim is that it expresses an idea with at least three moving parts. A sentence using that verb, or its context, really should provide them. Too often this doesn’t happen: it’s simply assumed that “we” understand what’s meant, as if this “we” is somehow static and known. This leads to the absurdity, for example, of Paulo Freire’s work being hijacked from its historical and socio-political context and used to justify all kinds of talk in utterly different contexts.

This leads me to another personal hobby-horse of mine: local theory. You can’t take a political theory “out” of its socio-historical context without reifying it, turning it into a sort of Platonic object rather than a particular, located practice. As soon as you’ve done that it’s become a piece of junk that’s likely to get in the way, and the only work worth doing with it is taking it out and throwing it in a skip.

The picture is North Korean Propaganda, by Luke Stephens. Creative Commons license