Thank all you for thinking about question

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

My first impulse was to do a Google search, which turns up what appear to be 
a number of examples of the genuine thing (though the first one in the list is 
clearly non-native speaker: "Thank all you for maintain my hope in U.S."). 
And of course a number of the hits don't count, since the phrase in question is 
embedded in phrases such as , "I want to. ..." But not all of them are.

That said, I'm also very sympathetic to Fillmore's intuitions. My intuition 
tells me that I would "have to" say "Thanks to you all for ..." or "Thanks to 
all you [+noun] for ... ," e.g., "Thanks to all you good people for ...". But 
I'm not convinced, either, that I have never said it the way Wayne said it. If 
people still believed in a competence/performance distinction, this would be a 
very good example of the difference, it seems to me.

In a message dated 1/26/04 1:03:02 PM, debaron at UIUC.EDU writes:


> On Jan 26, 2004, at 11:38 AM, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
> >
> > Subject:      YOU ALL is not Y'ALL
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > --------
> >
> > YOU ALL as an emphatic form of YOU is quite common outside the South.
> 
> Thanks, Ron, for reminding the list that there is a non-Southern you
> all as well. That reminds me of a phrase that still strikes me as odd:
> 
> thank all you . . .
> 
> The first time I noticed it was in scripted speech--a 1940s John Wayne
> western (I forget which one, maybe "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon") where
> Wayne, playing a soldier, says to some group of people, "Thank all you
> for [I don't remember now what he thanked them for]"
> 
> What would have sounded normal to my ear would be "Thank you all [for
> coming, for whatever}" or even "I'd like to thank all of you for ...."
> But that's not what the man said. The reason I remember it is that the
> very next day I heard a lecture by Charles Fillmore in which he
> insisted that "thank all you" could not occur in English. He didn't
> appreciate my counterexample. People don't say it much if at all today,
> but was it ever common?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Dennis
> 
> 
> Dennis Baron                                                office: 
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> Professor of English and Linguistics              mobile: 217-840-0776
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> 
>