Heard on Springer: "my cousin nephew"; "your baby mama"; "Mary,

[Josh Macfelder]

On Wed, 26 Nov 2008 06:53:02 -0800, Arnol Zwicky wrote:

> "I doubt that no such examples have ever come by you; you probably just
> didn't notice them before.  they're reasonably common in speech."

Firstly, thanks for your comment. The truth is the only examples of
resumptive pronouns in English that I have heard are "a guy who if he
pierced his ears gravy would come out of them" type (from an example
in your Language Log piece). At the time I thought it sounded funny :)
As for the "Mary..." structure, I may have certainly heard it, but the
first time I paid attention to it was in Brazil.

> why "rightfully"?

My bad, the sentence should have read "Colloquial Portuguese in Brazil
is famous for such structures (even though they're rightfully
considered slang _IN BP_)."

JM

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