Natural-Born Lover : Words

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Fri Aug 27 20:18:40 UTC 2004


>>>At 1:15 AM -0400 8/27/04, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>>>I've now listened and relistened to the words of Fats Domino's
>>>>"Natural-Born Lover" and I hear only:
>>>>
>>>>"I done got over at last"
>>>>
>>>>and not
>>>>
>>>>"I done got over you"
>>>>
>>>>or any other possible reading.
>>---------------------------------------------------------
>>>Maybe it's to be taken with "'you' understood", as with imperatives...
>>>
>>>larry
>>>
>...
>Would you provide an example of what you mean from some other dialect
>of English or from some other language, with more exposition? I must be
>unusually dense, or perhaps not experienced or educated enough, or just
>lacking the background to understand what to you is obvious. But it's
>simply not clear to me what you mean. Your point totally escapes me,
>though I'm sure - well, I hope that I'll be able to grasp it, if you
>will provide a broader explication. I really need some help, here. Will
>you provide it?
>TIA
>
>-Wilson Gray

I won't try speaking for Sam.  *My* point was semi-jocular, but I'm
willing to elaborate.  When I was in grade school, they used to teach
us that the subject of imperatives was "YOU understood".  This was
later fleshed out by Postal and others in the early years of
generative transformational grammar, when syntactic arguments based
on the distribution of reflexives ("Shave
{yourself/*myself/*himself/*themselves}") and tag questions ("Come
in, won't {you/*she/*I/*they}") were invoked to support a "YOU" in
underlying structure that was later deleted.  And no, I wasn't
assuming that similar arguments could be marshaled to support a "YOU
understood" as the object in the case of "I done got over ___ at
last".  Sorry to have been so obscure, but it is Friday afternoon.

larry



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