"Save Growlery! The Social Networks Built of Old Words"

[Laurence Horn]

On Aug 21, 2011, at 5:38 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 21, 2011 at 4:10 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>> Good beer makes everything more special, Ms. Thorpe said while
>> stocking up for a recent National Football League playoff game. I
>> like me some football, but I _don't like me *some* Coors Light_. So I'm
>> ensuring I will be happy this afternoon.
>> 
> 
> "_some_"?!!!
> 
> Well, I myself was once fully persuaded that simply changing
> 
> "Can't _nobody_ …"
> 
> into
> 
> "Can't _anybody_ …"
> 
> produced a standard, prescriptivist-pleasing string.

Well, it will produce a perfectly acceptable but different non-standard prescriptivist-no-doubt-upsetting string.  There are papers describing this non-concordial "negative declarative inversion" in white Alabama and west Texas speech, and it probably pops up elsewhere.  According to what I've read (this is also discussed under Negative Inversion at the Yale Grammatical Diversity site mentioned earlier:  http://microsyntax.sites.yale.edu/negative-inversion), African American English speakers tend to insist on negative concord when inverting, even if they vary concord use in other constructions.  


> And who knows
> exactly what was in the speaker's mind? Maybe she *was* under the
> impression that all that was needed was the elimination of the double
> negative in order to make everything cool.

I'd attribute it to a side-effect of the "I love me some X" snowclone that's been running rampant among otherwise non-native personal dative speakers since Toni Braxton's hit recording of "I Love Me Some Him".  So the "some" (which may or may not contribute any meaning in such cases) is preserved even under negation rather than switching to "no" (or "any").  In fact, negative occurrences of PDs are somewhat rare when they're not immediately primed as above ("I like me some X, but I don't like/hate me some/any/no Y").  I did the comparison counts on these for a paper awhile back and the contrasts are dramatic.  

> And it's probably only my
> personal background that makes the use of _some_ in place of _no_ in
> this structure feel like a harbinger of the end of the English
> language as we know it.

Well, it's certainly a sign of weakening constraints on the established dialect construction in question.  I don't think that's the case with "Can't anybody please him".   

LH

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org