"They was trying to hand me out a flyer."

[Neal Whitman]

I remember a song in Sunday school as a kid, one line of which went, "Hand me down my silver trumpet, Gabriel." I found the syntax interesting at the time. Not actually bad, but interesting because of the garden-path effect of "hand me down," which I suspect is the same thing going on when "hand me out a flyer" sounds odd.

Neal

On Jul 12, 2011, at 9:50 AM, Damien Hall <D.Hall at KENT.AC.UK> wrote:

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> Poster:       Damien Hall <D.Hall at KENT.AC.UK>
> Subject:      "They was trying to hand me out a flyer."
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> George said:
>
> 'Is "hand me out" really common in England?'
>
> Yes - and in the rest of the UK (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) as well.  Well, I'd say 'hand out a flyer to me' would be the majority variant, but 'hand me out a flyer' is a pretty common minority variant, maybe commoner in production in the North of England than elsewhere, and I don't think it would be thought of as especially unusual by any native speaker of BrE that heard it.
>
> So, sentences like the following made-up ones are completely acceptable to me (Standard Southern British English, brought up in London, but with lots of family in the North):
>
> 'The doctor wrote me out a prescription.'
>
> 'I'm waiting for him to send me that back' ( = 'send back that [thing] to me')
>
> etc etc.
>
> There has been some work done on the acceptability of these sentences, I think by Bill Haddican (then of the University of York, which is in the North of England, of course; now of CUNY Queens) - he would have done it exactly because Americans can't usually produce sentences like that (and he is American).  I'll ask him whether he has any results from it.
>
> 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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