"I'm gonna buy me a dog"

[Mira Ariel]

Dear Scott,

Of course the sentence 'I sold me a dog' is acceptable in the context and
reading you gave it, which is what I too said in my message! But I think
that in this case I'm only the seller, not the buyer (as well)! But in 'I
sold myself a dog' I am the buyer as well as the seller. So, you can
substitute 'me' with 'myself' in the 'buy' case but not in the 'sell' case.

Also:

I sold a dog to myself
??I sold a dog to me.

But I'd better stop. I'm not a native speaker. The corpora I looked at had
no sell + pronoun ananphoric to the subject (as in 'I sold me'). But I did
find 'buy' with such ananphoric pronoun rather than reflexive (as in 'I
bought me').

Best,

Mira Ariel


----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott DeLancey" <delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu>
To: "Mira Ariel" <mariel at post.tau.ac.il>
Cc: "Jo Rubba" <jrubba at calpoly.edu>; "funknet" <FUNKNET at mailman.rice.edu>
Sent: Saturday, September 25, 2004 12:27
Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] "I'm gonna buy me a dog"


> On Sat, 25 Sep 2004, Mira Ariel wrote:
>
> >  (Cf. ?? I sold me a dog yesterday -- Imagine you work at a pet shop and
you
> > sold yourself a dog there. You would then say I sold myself a dog).
>
> For me (though I'm not really a native speaker of this dialect) this
> is perfectly good in the middle sense.  If I raise dogs, and sell them
> for a living, and I made a good sale yesterday, then I sold me a dog
> yesterday.  All that's necessary for the construction to be good is
> that I benefited somehow from the transaction.
>
> Scott DeLancey
> Department of Linguistics
> 1290 University of Oregon
> Eugene, OR 97403-1290, USA
>
> delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
> http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html
>
>
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