"your guys's" (2nd person pl. poss.)

[Jonathan Lighter]

Am not sure what you mean by "lexicalized" in this case.  "Widespread," maybe?  I don't recall hearing this before and have no idea of its social or geographical distribution.

I certainly agree that novel forms such as this must develop or be adopted early in the individual's acquisition of English.  And to survive into adulthood, they either must not be strongly discouraged by parents, or else they must be so common already that parents' corrections go unheeded.

I'm much persuaded of the principle that novel grammatical forms created by children lie at the root of most all substantive grammatical change in language, including the disruption and loss of case endings, leveling of verbal moods, etc.

It's the little tots who ruin language for the rest of us !  Had W. C. Fields been a linguist, he would have pointed this out 70 years ago !

JL


James C Stalker <stalker at MSU.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: James C Stalker
Subject: Re: =?utf-8?Q?=22your_guys's=22?= (2nd person pl. poss.)
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I checked to see how y’all’s was doing, vis a vis the google. Your
all’s has 278,000 hits; y’all’s 22,900; yall’s 7,790. Might this
suggest that “you” + “guys” is not as far along the lexicalization
path as “yall”? But is on its way?
The process may be not dissimilar to the acquisition of the tense system.
When my older son was about 3 years old, many years ago, he produced the
following utterances: I catched a bee fish. It didn’t bit. It didn’t
bits. He then abandoned the linguist problem and finished what he wanted to
say. Knowing where to put inflectional morphemes is tricky, either when
acquiring your language, or when the language is changing.

Jim Stalker

Jonathan Lighter writes:

> The amusing 2004 film, _Napoleon Dynamite_ features a poor nerd antihero who says the following:
>
> "Could I use your guys's phone for a sec ?"
>
> The plot is set in the town of Preston, ID, which happens to be the birthplace of cowriter Jared Hess (b. 1979).
>
> Google turns up nearly 7,000 hits for "your guys's," so I think we can consider it real. (That's twice as many hits as for "you guys's," though the former group may be swollen artificially by references to the film.)
>
> Me, I say "your.
>
> JL
>
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James C. Stalker
Department of English
Michigan State University


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