Heard on "Jerry": "VP (PREP) _me/you/him_ NP"

[Margaret Lee]

I love _me_ some Jerry Springer!
 
--Margaret Lee




________________________________
From: Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Sent: Wed, February 9, 2011 7:24:17 PM
Subject: Heard on "Jerry": "VP (PREP) _me/you/him_ NP"

Forty-ish, r-full, Southern white male speaker:

"A few weeks later [i.e. after he had left her], I got _me_ a
surprise_: my wife was pregnant with our third child!"


I've never been able to do more than to know intuitively how to use
this construction. I've heard it used by my fellow blacks and by
Southern whites all of my life. Yet, it remains a mystery to me, to
the extent that certain examples have stuck in my memory since
forever.

1) I _got me a eighteen-year-old jitterbug_.
2a) I'm just sitting here, _eating me some potato chips_.
2b) I'm just sitting here, _eating on me a hamburger_.
3) _Get you a tray_!

(Remembered only because the native of Darien, CT, to whom it was
spoken was absolutely *astonished* that there existed native-speakers
of English who could use such a syntactic structure effortlessly,
without having to pause for reflection.)

4) I laid down last night, _thinking about me a mojo hand_.


I've pondered the possibility of some kind of Dative-of-Interest-like
phenomenon. But, in languages that are generally considered to have a
true DAT-REF, the construction is usually not nearly so simple as the
SE/BE construction. In, e.g. Rumanian, a sentence that translates as

"He was beaten into a soft apple ['to a pulp'] me-DAT you-DAT"

I can't recall either whether a non-literal translation was supplied
or what the Rumanian original was - Nandris, Grigore. 1953. Colloquial
Rumanian. London, Routledge & Kegan (yes, I did pull that out of my
memory), should anyone care. IAC, if the DAT-REF is like that, then
trying to attack the structure from that point of view may be useless.

Well, I've never been a syntactician. What do I know?
--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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