Song-title in Cuban Spanish

[Laurence Horn]

On Mar 24, 2012, at 10:00 PM, Michael Newman wrote:

> My husband, a Spanish syntactician. The phenomenon is called "inherent se" (se inherente).  It has syntactic consequences, for example you can't say "me comí manzanas" (without a determiner).  It creates some semantic differences, maybe not that different between I got a car and I got myself a car.

Or perhaps, which is what I was hoping, more like the personal dative in "I need me a new pickup truck" (vs. "I need a new pickup truck") or "I love me some him" (vs. "I love him"), which we've discussed in earlier threads and about which there has been a lot of work lately--including some by me, arguing that the PD adds a non-truth-conditional ("conventionally implicated") layer of meaning, as you note below.  So this is nice.  In many European languages, there's a much better established construction involving "affectee" datives that are *not* coreferential with the subject, translated as e.g. "She did me her homework", but the ones in which the datives are coreferential with the subjects are rarer and more constrained, at least in French, German, and other languages.

LH



> Not everything can be explained in terms of simple mapping into truth conditional semantics. Why would anyone who speaks a human language expect it to be otherwise?
>
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> Michael Newman
> Associate Professor of Linguistics
> Queens College/CUNY
> michael.newman at qc.cuny.edu
>
>
>
> On Mar 24, 2012, at 9:09 PM, Ronald Butters wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Ronald Butters <ronbutters at AOL.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: Song-title in Cuban Spanish
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> You ate your (inalienably possessed) mango?
>>
>> But it seems that is an idiom. I find this, and more, at =
>> <wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=3D1089821>:
>>
>> 1.
>> In Argentina te la comiste has several meanings: that someone didn't see =
>> something or that someone forgot something:
>>
>> Te comiste la coma en esa oraci=F3n.
>> Estuve llamando a todas las personas de la lista pero a esa me la com=ED.
>>
>> It's also common in sports to express that you missed an easy goal or =
>> volley, etc.
>>
>> =BFC=F3mo pudiste comerte ese gol? (Te lo comiste/devoraste/morfaste)
>>
>> It also has sexual implications (you can figure this out).
>>
>> =A1Saludos!
>>
>> 2.
>> See also=20
>> "Papi te Comiste mis Papas"
>>
>> (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DYc0j34qu3Is)
>>
>> 3.
>> AND (at <http://www.tubabel.com/definicion/35141-te-la-comiste>)
>>
>>
>> TE LA COMISTE: forma de expresar gratitud: Frase utilizada com=FAnmente =
>> entre amigos en momentos de agradecimientos; por ejemplo=85 cuando =
>> alguien hace un favor muy grande por uno. O cuando un allegado nos da un =
>> obsequio muy anhelado. =93Te la comiste=94 =3D =93Eres lo m=E1ximo=94; =
>> =93hiciste bien al darme eso=94, "mejor, imposible". Tambi=E9n esta =
>> expresi=F3n se le dice a alguien que se ha destacado en algo, por lo que =
>> tiene este significado tambi=E9n: =93Lo haz hecho excelente=94.
>>
>> On Mar 24, 2012, at 5:43 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>
>>> Orquesta Aragon: "_Te_ comiste el mango"
>>> =20
>>> "You ate _you_ the mango"?
>>> =20
>>> Google Translate has:
>>> =20
>>> "You ate the mango,"
>>> =20
>>> a standard translation.
>>> =20
>>> I'm not sufficiently knowledgeable in Spanish to know whether this is
>>> a true parallel to the English construction. But, WTF?
>>> =20
>>> --
>>> -Wilson
>>> -----
>>> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
>>> to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>>> -Mark Twain
>>> =20
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