Linguistics

506 readers

1 users here now

Welcome to the community about the science of human Language!

Everyone is welcome here: from laymen to professionals, Historical linguists to discourse analysts, structuralists to generativists.

Rules:

Stay on-topic. Specially for more divisive subjects.
Post sources whenever reasonable to do so.
Avoid crack theories and pseudoscientific claims.
Have fun!

Related communities:

founded 10 months ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Personal datives | Yale Grammatical Diversity Project: English in North America (ygdp.yale.edu)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Native English speakers, how do you use personal datives? Today I came across an interesting text on the phenomenon here. Here are some examples from the text:

4] a. I got me some candy.

b. You got you some candy.

c. We got us some candy.

5] a. He got him some candy.

b. She got her some candy.

c. *It got it some candy.

d. They got them some candy.

(5c is marked with * to mark its grammatical unacceptability)

As a non-native speaker, I find sentences (4a) and (4c) to be natural, although I'd probably never use them myself. However, other sentences are odd to me, and seem as if they would cause confusion, they could be interpreted as if the subject got the candy for someone else. (4b), with 'you', is even more odd to my ears, even though a cited study says it is much more common than 3rd person constructions.

How do you perceive these sentences, are they all acceptable/natural to you?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Oh, I guess one thing about 4b. Thinking more about 4b, I find I can't really imagine it being said "you got you some candy" instead of "you gotchu some candy" or "you gotcha some candy".

Also, leaving out the personal dative feels too formal to use with young kids unless being at least a little stern.

Oh, and aside from the obvious differences in the pronouns involved ("she" only refers to female subjects, "it" only for "things"... can you tell I'm not that knowledgeable on linguistics jargon, lol) I don't really see much difference in who is referred to in those examples, nor in contrasting them with equivalent examples without the dative except for the aforementioned differences in formality and "playfulness".