x and them

[Dennis R. Preston]

Holt on thar you antigenetivists!

The Dales was over (clearly plural).

We was over to the Dales-Dales'. (Plural or elliptical for "the Dales' place").
If it were singular (e.g., first-name), I doubt if you would question the
possessiveness of "We was over to Dale's" ("Dale's place).

This recalls, I am sure, our oft-discuyssed Kroger's, and by extension,
Wal-Mart's and so on.

dInIs (who, with his Lousiville speech transplanted to MI, lives
dangerously close to a Meier Store and is heartily misunderstood [and
mocked] when he claims he is "going to Mars')



>On Wed, 1 Mar 2000, Peter A. McGraw wrote:
>
>> Let's take this thread in a different direction.
>> A similar expression to "X and them" is "Xs" or "X's" (I'm not sure which
>> it is).  Thus a great aunt of mine in Iowa (who had lived on a farm all her
>> life) referred to her son and his family as "Dales" (or "Dale's"?).  I've
>> never heard it anywhere else, but when I mentioned it as a curiosity to a
>> female colleague in Dayton, Ohio, who was something of a feminist, she
>> said, "Oh, yes--I just hate that!" indicating at least that it probably
>> wasn't restricted to Iowa.  (This colleague had grown up in Albuquerque,
>> NM, but lived most of her adult life in urban Ohio.)
>> Does anybody know more about the geography of this, or whether the /-s/ is
>> plural or possessive?
>
>I don't know anything about the geography of this construction, but I can
>give you another data point: my girlfriend does this, and she's from Port
>Orchard, Washington (near Seattle).  Her intuition is that it is a plural,
>not a possessive.  I would tend to agree.


Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736