Prescriptive Linguists

[David A. Daniel]

>    Oh I'll pawn you my gold watch and chain, love,
>    And I'll pawn you my gold diamond ring,
>    I will pawn you this heart in my bosom,
>    Only say that you'll love me again.

This needs some commas:
Oh, I'll pawn you, my gold watch and chain, love...


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---- Original message ----
>Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2008 20:15:31 -0500
>From: Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>
>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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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org