"Let's get you that tattoo finished."

[Jonathan Lighter]

That was one rash professor.

Also, I don't find the dative in the "tattoo" sentence at all odd. What is
odd, however, is the syntax with "finished."  I'm not sufficiently expert in
syntactical description to go much beyond that.

JL

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 4:59 AM, Damien Hall <D.Hall at kent.ac.uk> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Damien Hall <D.Hall at KENT.AC.UK>
> Subject:      "Let's get you that tattoo finished."
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> In BrE that's an entirely standard and common construction - the _you_ as a
> benefactive dative, perhaps?  (I assume that's what caused Wilson to remark
> upon it.)
>
> I assume that because I remember an American professor's remarking on my
> saying (quite innocently) "I'm waiting for her to send me that data".  He
> maintained that such pre-posed datives were at best uncommon in American
> English and that he would have had to say "I'm waiting for her to send that
> data to me".  What do others think?
>
> Damien
>
> --
>
> Damien Hall
>
> University of Kent (UK)
> Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, 'Towards a New Linguistic Atlas of France'
>
> English Language and Linguistics, School of European Culture and Languages
>
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