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I have posted a question titled "Why does paper cut so well?" (on the Physics stack exchange). After a while, I noticed that over 40 people understood the question as "Why is it so easy to cut paper (with a pair of scissors)?". But what I meant was that it was easy to cut things with paper, paper being the cutting material. So I edited the question to make it more explicit.

I am not a native English speaker, and I completely missed the ambiguity. And now that I know about it, even if I force myself, I am unable to understand the question "Why does paper cut so well?" as "Why is it so easy to cut through paper?". I would understand if the question was "How can paper be cut so well?". So using "to be cut" as opposed to "to cut".

I wonder what I am missing. How is it possible to understand the question that way?

untreated_paramediensis_karnik
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    If it's any consolation I actually read it the way you intended when I first read it. It immediately made me wonder about paper cuts. So, I'm also at a bit of a loss as to why you would find that people understood paper as the material to be cut and not the material that would do the cutting. – psosuna Sep 13 '18 at 19:54
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    @psosuna I also asked on IRC, and about half the people understood it either way. So it was split there too. – untreated_paramediensis_karnik Sep 13 '18 at 19:55
  • Oh, funny, I didn't even think of the second interpretation, having seen the original title on the HNQ. – Azor Ahai -him- Sep 13 '18 at 20:23
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    I would have thought the second meaning would be expressed by 'why is paper cut so easily? ' I immediately accepted your own meaning relating to paper-cuts on skin. – Nigel J Sep 13 '18 at 20:29
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    If you make cut transitive the ambiguity goes away: Why does paper cut fingers so easily? – John Lawler Sep 13 '18 at 22:57
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    My immediate interpretation of the title was the one you did not intend. But upon reading the question I quickly understood your actual meaning. Very understandable that to a non-native the alternative interpretation wouldn't be obvious. My guess is that for me, my quick grasp of paper as a noun plus cut as a verb led me to associate with "cutting paper". Multiple answers below explain the grammar behind this interpretation. – Dave Costa Sep 13 '18 at 23:59
  • Not enough words to know if you're using the noun or the verb. – Mazura Sep 14 '18 at 11:55
  • If you were to cut paper, what verb would you use in-place of "cut"? Slice? – Malady Sep 14 '18 at 12:32
  • I wonder if there's an American/British difference here. I (UK) immediately thought that you meant what you meant. Mainly because for the alternative I'd expect 'easily' rather than 'so well' - I associate well with the active part of teh sentence –  Sep 14 '18 at 14:14
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    A less ambiguous way of asking might be "why is paper so good at cutting [things]" or "...so effective at cutting [things]." But I, like psosuna and Orangesandlemons, immediately understood the question as you intended. @Orangesandlemons I'm from the US. – phoog Sep 14 '18 at 14:28
  • @Orangesandlemons - I'm also UK and got the exact opposite sense of the question than you did; I thought along the lines of "why does butter spread so well" and similar. It's funny how different people see the same thing different ways. – Spratty Sep 14 '18 at 15:23
  • @Spratty and phoog so probably not a geographical usage issue. –  Sep 14 '18 at 15:29
  • Your original title …How come paper can cut so well?… was less ambiguous, although it doesn't eliminate the double interpretation completely. The editor should have left the "How come" part well alone. – Mari-Lou A Sep 14 '18 at 21:43
  • When I first saw the title, it was "Why does paper cut so well?". I made a suggested edit of the title to "Why does paper cut skin so well?", since that was what the body of the question was about. That edit was ultimately rejected in favour of "Why does paper cut through things so well?", which is not so accurate as the question is still only about cutting skin (on fingers, etc.). If you want the question to be more general, you should edit the body to match the title. – CJ Dennis Sep 16 '18 at 04:14
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    @CJDennis you should bring this conversation below the original post on the Physics Stack Exchange. Nevertheless, from the body of the text: "it's extremely counter-intuitive that a sheet of paper could cut through human skin and probably through stiffer/harder materials". To me, it is clear that I am not solely focusing on skin itself. – untreated_paramediensis_karnik Sep 16 '18 at 12:13
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    Speaking as someone who interpreted the question "why does paper cut so well?" as "why is it easy to make a good job of cutting paper?" - if I asked you "why does paper fold so well?" would you imagine I am using the paper as a tool to fold something else? (Just curious) – Caius Jard Sep 17 '18 at 08:26
  • @coniferous_smellerULPBG-W8ZgjR I've never noticed paper cutting through anything other than skin, do you have examples of it cutting harder materials? – Barmar Sep 17 '18 at 19:13
  • @Barmar if you watch the video posted in the Physics Stack Exchange, you'll see that it cuts through wood, plastic (PVC?) and almost through a coconut. – untreated_paramediensis_karnik Sep 17 '18 at 19:27
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    @coniferous_smellerULPBG-W8ZgjR What's going on there is very different from the "easy" cutting that occurs when you get a papercut. That's like saying that nylon cuts well because weed trimmer blades are made from it. – Barmar Sep 17 '18 at 19:35
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    Does this answer your question? "This wine is drinking nicely" : does anything else drink nicely? Or middle voice vs passive voice/605907#605907? The classic ambiguous example is 'Jim is cooking in the kitchen.' – Edwin Ashworth Oct 22 '23 at 12:00

7 Answers7

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This kind of construction has been called an "internal argument as subject" construction, but is more broadly known as a "middle construction," as in between active and passive. It strikes me as not particularly unusual, if maybe a little bit literary.

For example, from Massam (1991), where "_" marks the empty structural object:

This article analyses middle constructions in English, accounting for their key syntactic and semantic properties. The analysis rests on the observation that there are certain similarities between middle, tough and recipe-context null-object constructions, such as in (ia-c).

(i) (a) This bread cuts _ easily.

(b) This bread is easy to cut _.

(c) Take bread. Cut _ carefully (and arrange _ nicely).

Here are some more examples of IASCs, from the same article:

(7) (a) The brown bread cuts easily.

(b) This blouse washes like a dream.

(c) The soup that eats like a meal. (Campbell's advertisement)

From the author's conclusion, which I will attempt to summarize at the end:

In this way, middles are claimed to ... involve non-thematic chains which are licensed by being co-indexed with a chain which does receive a theta-role [and to] involve empty reflexives which do not arise via Move-α but which are base-generated. ... The view of middles utilized here is one which considers their defining property to consist of an element of modality which appears in INFL and which is usually further spelled out by an overt adverbial or modal element. It is this element which is able (universally) to license a non-thematic subject which serves to identify a null object.

In other words, the author of the paper suggests not that "paper" moves from the object position to the subject, but rather the presence of an adverbial like "well" or "easily" (or a modal*) allows for the use of a patient** as a structural subject in an English middle construction.

After all, it would be odd to say "?Paper cuts" to mean "Paper is cuttable."

So in other words, the fact that you want to say something like "You can cut paper easily" allows you to instead say the English sentence "Paper cuts easily," which is indeed ambiguous with "Paper cuts [other things] easily."

That some people analyzed your title as one or the other depends on the fact that paper is both cut often and cuts people frequently (after all, we have the word "paper cut"), and it just depends on which association came to mind more easily for each person.

For example, me, and other people who interpreted your sentence as "paper is easy to cut" might have been thinking about scissors gliding through paper.

* An example of a modal licensing middle construction is "This blouse won't wash" (p. 126, example 27.f).

** In linguistics, the patient is the recipient of the action of the verb, as in "Mary cuts the paper."

Citations:

Massam, D. (1992). Null objects and non-thematic subjects. Journal of Linguistics, 28(01), 115. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226700015012

Azor Ahai -him-
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It might have to do with the describing construction that exists in English in the form of:

Object + Applicable action + Adverb

In this case, let me change the verb cut to shred.

Consider this passage, then:

Paper shreds well. Glass, however, doesn't. It shatters before it can be shred, when run through a shredder.

Here, it's not very ambiguous that we're talking about the property of the materials paper and glass, and their degree of ability to be shred. However, the context necessary for the passage to be understood that way is present.

If the passage were just:

Paper shreds well. Glass, however, doesn't.

...then it is a bit more ambiguous. Logically speaking, paper as a material is not a worthwhile material to do any shredding, whereas glass would, so logically this doesn't make sense. Therefore, the other sense needs to be taken into account, to make logical sense of what's being said.

It's likely that whoever mistook your context for the other context didn't immediately think credible that paper would be the cutting agent and not the material that is being cut.

psosuna
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As somebody who also got the wrong meaning of your question. There is another reason: how expected a concept is.

As the other posters have said your sentence is constructed in a way that was ambiguous, so people use their experience to asses what you are asking.

It is much much much more common to discuss cutting paper than being cut by paper*, so people presume you are discussing cutting paper, as 9 time out of 10 you will be.

  • unless you are holding a bleeding finger under their nose and saying "why does paper cut so well?"
WendyG
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This is an interesting case. The difficulty is often spotting such things in your own writing, or when editing work from someone with the same viewpoint. This is just as true for native speakers, in fact we may be more likely to pick up on a second meaning with a slang or idiomatic background.

It is of course easily avoided. You can rewrite the sentence – "Why does paper cut skin so well?" – or give a gentle steer in the right direction – "Why does paper cut so effectively?" (instead of "Why does paper cut so easily?"). In technical work, rephrasing is often best, to remove the residual ambiguity.

Chris H
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Suppose that you'd instead asked "Why does paper tear so well?" It would be completely obvious that you meant "Why is it so easy to tear paper?" and not "Why does paper tear other things so well?" In that case, the second parsing doesn't really make sense. However, in the case of "cut", both parsings make sense and some people picked the wrong one. Also, cutting paper with something is much more common than cutting something with paper, so people may well think of the wrong interpretation first.

So, yes, your title was ambiguous. However, the body of the question was clear so, anyone who misunderstood clearly hadn't read the actual question.

David Richerby
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In this context the verb "cut" behaves like an ergative verb, a verb that can be used both in an active and passive sense. That is, the same verb can either refer to an action, or to be the recipient of the action.

Common examples in English are "look" and "smell". You can "look at" something, and something can "look good". "I smell the flower" vs "the flower smells nice". In the latter example, the flower is the subject of the sentence, but the meaning is that the flower produces a smell (i.e. is being smelled).

Another common example in many languages is a word that means both "to call" and "to be called", e.g. llamar in Spanish, appeler in French, heißen in German, 叫 in Chinese.

In English the verb "to cut" is usually not used in this way. However, in English, (especially in casual situations) almost any verb can be used as an ergative verb if the context is very clear. For instance, expressions like "the book reads well" (meaning the book is easy to read) is something one hears from time to time.

When a native English speaker hears the phrase "paper cuts well", two conflicting processes occur in their head. On the one hand, paper is something that usually is cut rather than used as a cutting tool, but on the other hand, "cuts" is usually used in an active rather than passive sense. So I guess one of these interpretations has to win. For what it's worth, my first instinct was to interpret it as "why is paper so good at cutting (other) things".

Aqualone
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I suggest that this is an example of the confusion between transitive and intransitive verbs found in American speech. If the sentence had contained an object of the verb cut there would have been no confusion.

Aled Cymro
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