" Olive, the other reindeer"; was Re: "Trolling" for "Trawling": An Eggcorn?

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:21 PM -0400 8/4/07, sagehen wrote:
>  >At 9:13 AM -0700 8/4/07, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>>>I was scarred - I can remember lying awake waiting for the ax to
>>>fall - but I never had a problem parsing "now I lay me."
>>>
>>>    JL
>>
>>Right; the scary line was definitely "If I should die before I wake"
>>(whether or not you understood this to imply postmortem zombiehood)
>>rather than the "Now I lay me down to sleep" opener, although I
>>suppose some proto-Chomskyan youngsters might have been kept awake by the
>>horrors of Principle B being violated.
>>
>>LH
>>-----------
>Uh, what is Principle B?

Glossing over the details, it's Chomsky's version of the general
constraint barring ordinary pronouns (as opposed to reflexives) from
occurring in the same simple clause as a coreferring antecedent,
hence ruling out "*I love me" or the coreferential reading of "He
hates him"  (The former does occur, although not interchangeably with
"I love myself", but that's another story.)  Principle A is the
complementary constraint requiring reflexives to occur only in the
same simple clause as a coreferring antecedent, again ignoring
significant details.  (And again there are reflexives that don't
abide by this principle; there have been a number of papers,
including one by Parker, Riley & Meyer in American Speech in 1990, on
Principle A-ignoring reflexives.)  "I lay me down to sleep", like
"Sit/Set you down", are problematic for Principle B, as are the not
too dissimilar personal datives ("My husband used to love him some
Jack Daniels") that we've discussed on the list and that Webelhuth &
Dannenberg wrote about in a recent American Speech (2006).

>I don't think I found the "If I should die before I wake" so much scary as
>nonsensical, but I just filed it away alongside a lot of other archaic
>notions embodied in fairy tales, &c.
>I suspect there is another legacy of that grisly little prayer: the lie/lay
>confusion.  Even though the transitive construction is legit, its use
>instead of straightforward "lie down" probably in a fuzzy way seems to
>legitimate the misuse that is nearly universal now.
>AM

Well, "lay + Pronoun" *is* standard in other transitive ditties,
without causing any apparent decoding problems.  There are song lines
off the top of my head that go

Lay me down easy

and

Lay me down, Carolina

--not "lie me down".  The main difference is that these involve
non-coreference between layer and layee.  And yes, these involve the
literal and not (or at least not necessarily)
metaphorical/euphemistic uses of "lay" with personal object.  Also
many songs that voice the sentiment "{I'd love to/I wanna} lay you
down".*  I think it's just the archaic quality of the coreferring
non-reflexive that bothers us in the prayer--besides the fear of
death, of course.

LH

*More relevant to our purposes are these two song lyrics:

"Lay you down beside me tonight"
"Now I lay me down beside you"

I think one factor may be simply scansion (although the latter may
also be intended to invoke the bedtime prayer); the "me" and "you"
work better here (or at least differently) than either zero or a full
reflexive.  Does anyone know a name for these constructions?
"Pseudo-transitives"?

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