Possible antedating for "you all"

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Tue Dec 10 00:17:05 UTC 2002


>On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
>#Compare Tiny Tim's "God bless you, every one", signalling not "you
>#(pl.) as opposed to (sg.)" but the fact that the set of blessees
>#extends to every member of the set of addressees, with nobody left
>#out.
>
>I'm pretty sure that that's "God bless <us>, every one."

Ooops.

>Not that the
>failure of this citation invalidates your point.
>
Exactly.  In fact, the first person makes it even clearer that the
"every one" isn't a disambiguator here, any more (I claim) than the
"all" in the early "you all" cite.

Larry



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