Prescriptive Linguists

[Jonathan Lighter]

Weird, but a lot closer to the unweird "git me some pork rinds" than the Mary and the car business.

  Just to clinch this, I must ask William Salmon how he would paraphrase the "Mary" example - and, even if he can understand it, does it sound perfectly natural?

  JL

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: Prescriptive Linguists
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At 5:16 PM -0500 1/30/08, Wilson Gray wrote:
>Well, it does kinda, sorta depend upon what you're accustomed to
>hearing. When I was in the the Army, a fellow GI, a white native of
>Darien, Connecticut, and a Stanford dropout, was flabbergasted to hear
>a white, Southern cook tell him to "git you a tray." He couldn't
>believe that such a sentence could be spoken by any native speaker of
>English. "'Get you a tray'?! 'Get you a tray'?! What the fuck kind of
>English is that?!"
>
>It sounds fine to me. I wonder what he would have thought of the black
>DJ who commented, "I'm jus' sittin' heah, eatin' own me a hamboiguh"
>or the blues line, "I laid down las' night, thankin' about me a mojo
>hane," abstracting away from the phonetics, of course.
>
>-Wilson

Or cf. the title of the following talk on the construction:

Sroda, Mary Sue & Margaret Mishoe. 1995. "I jus like to look at me
some goats": Dialectal pronominals in Southern English. Paper
presented at NWAV 24 conference,

LH

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