a bit more on the Coors Light example...

[Laurence Horn]

On Aug 21, 2011, at 7:49 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:

> 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.  

To this, Kurt Queller of the U. of Idaho, a non-ads-l subscriber but fellow PD aficionado, appends the following remarks, which tend to support Wilson's intuitions:
==================  

Even granting the syntactic / contextual priming of the negative, though, they seem somewhat "snowclone-ish," don't they?  For one thing, note how they carry over from the antecedent (positive) phrase the positive polarity item "some" -- which hardly seems vernacular.  (Where standard would ordinarily opt for the negative-polarity "…any…," vernacular should normally go for the negative-polarity "…no…".)

Out of curiosity, I just did a quick g-search on "I don't like me no".  Out of some 54,400,000 hits, there looked to be lots of false positives, but of the first six or so true positives, only one was of this contrastive "I like me some X, but I don't like me no Y" type (and it's clearly a tongue-in-cheek dagnabbit:  "…I don't like me no bad grammar").  

Three of them, however, seem to instantiate a very specific discourse routine, which would seem (whether actually produced by deep vernacular speakers or not) to have a fair likelihood of reflecting real vernacular competence: 
"I Love My Fat Husband"
Ed is gaining the weight back and I am happy about that!  I do not like me no skinny mens.

[From a thread on SNAKES]  http://www.wmi.org/multi_boards/other_topics/message.html?message_id=330830:

 I'm only scared of 3 kinds from lukinupinbama #15447  3/11/2011 5:29:18 PM
 of snakes:
1.live ones 2.dead ones 3.sticks that look like snakes         I will give them my boat, truck or whatever and immediately EVACUATE. Ran up on a cotty-moccasin in creek last year and emptied my Glock on him 15 times, in muddy water. Then sat there on my ATV in the muddy water for 10 minutes, afraid to move. Was out of ammo or would have fired until I ran out, even if it was 100 rounds! No sir, Cuz, I don't like me no snakes.

"…And by the way boy, I got me certain rules on this here bus! And I aim to enforce them! Now listen here! ‘First rule: no interruptions while I’m a talkin’. Second rule: don’t ya ever go a sassin!’ I don’t like me no sassin or smart mouthin, no-sir-ree! If you’re a smart mouther, you’re on the wrong bus! Causin’ if ya do any goin’ off at the mouth, I might have a mind to let ya’ll out in the middle of nowhere! ‘Third rule: no cussin’. Ya got that straight, boy?"
http://www.appsondroid.com/chapter16.htm 

In each of these three cases, the negative PD seems to function as an affectively laden COMMENT on a preceding assertion, in effect EXPLAINING what was just said with reference to the speaker's bottom-line character (the way s/he simply IS).  -- The essential pattern seems to be: 

[  { P } .  Coz, { Q } . ]

... where 'P' is one or more clauses vividly rendering (a) something that happened, or (b) an adjuration to the hearer, and 'Q' is the construction 'I don't like me no X (no, sir-ree).'  

Only the 2nd of the above 3 examples has an explicit logical connective 'coz', but the same sort of explanatory relation seems implicit in the 1st and 3rd examples as well.  In each case, the explanation offered is in the nature of a "that's just the way I am, and you might as well not be trying to talk me out of it" sort of statement.  (Note also the collocational preference for "no, sir(ree)!")  

Ms. Thorpe's ""I like me some X, but I don’t like me some Y" pattern is clearly also quite well attested out there on 'teh interwebs' -- as you have shown, Larry! -- but it still smells quite snowclonish (to me, at least).  In view of the above, I suspect that a more authentic usage, with respect to drinking beer while watching football, would look something like this:

"…And if you're fixing to bring some beer for the playoffs, don't be bringing none of that watery horsepiss, hear?  (Coz) I don't like me no Coors Lite.  (No sir-ree)." 

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