"Let's get you that tattoo finished."

[Jonathan Lighter]

I guess the professor had never heard the quintessential phrase "Gimme,
gimme, gimme!"

It would have given pause to him.

JL

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 8:07 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "Let's get you that tattoo finished."
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> That was one rash professor.
>
> Also, I don't find the dative in the "tattoo" sentence at all odd. What is
> odd, however, is the syntax with "finished."  I'm not sufficiently expert
> in
> syntactical description to go much beyond that.
>
> JL
>
> On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 4:59 AM, Damien Hall <D.Hall at kent.ac.uk> wrote:
>
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> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       Damien Hall <D.Hall at KENT.AC.UK>
> > Subject:      "Let's get you that tattoo finished."
> >
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > PLEASE NOTE MY NEW E-MAIL ADDRESS
> >
> > In BrE that's an entirely standard and common construction - the _you_ as
> a
> > benefactive dative, perhaps?  (I assume that's what caused Wilson to
> remark
> > upon it.)
> >
> > I assume that because I remember an American professor's remarking on my
> > saying (quite innocently) "I'm waiting for her to send me that data".  He
> > maintained that such pre-posed datives were at best uncommon in American
> > English and that he would have had to say "I'm waiting for her to send
> that
> > data to me".  What do others think?
> >
> > Damien
> >
> > --
> >
> > Damien Hall
> >
> > University of Kent (UK)
> > Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, 'Towards a New Linguistic Atlas of
> France'
> >
> > English Language and Linguistics, School of European Culture and
> Languages
> >
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