grammatically speaking...

[Joanne M. Despres]

Could the "explain me what you mean" construction be a calque on "explique-moi..."?
Maybe it is grammatically incorrect, at least within this context; on
the other hand, personal pronouns are sometimes used as datives
in English, as in the expressions, "send me an e-mail," "drop me a
line," "write me when you get back," etc.  I guess those analogous
examples led me to think of the syntactic structure of sentence #1
as theoretically possible, or at least not wholly unprecedented,
though in practice never used by native English speakers with this
particular verb.

Joanne

On 7 Jan 2003, at 11:51, Lois Nathan wrote:

> However, and I have not as yet been able to figure this
> out, I, a native American speaker teaching at the Université du Havre,
> France, hear French colleagues in the English Department always say things
> with some similarity to sentence number 1, for example:  Explain me what you
> mean.  To me that's grammatically incorrect.  I don't know if the English
> language somewhere in the world today considers that OK.  I'd love to know if
> that is the case.
>
> Lois Nathan