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

[Wilson Gray]

On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 11:30 AM, William Salmon
<wsalmon1 at interchange.ubc.ca> wrote:
> '...eating on me a hamburger' sounds okay to me. And there are a few ghits for 'drinking on me some', giving examples like this:
>
> I am enjoying myself relaxing listening to alil old school and drinking on me some red wine!!
>
> the fam is sleep, (They can't hang)I'm up, drinking on me some Pink Panties
>

Needless to say, these also are completely grammatical for me, too.
The problem for me has been that I've never been able to get a
conscious grasp on what underlying syntactico-semantic structure
underlies and motivates this feature of SE/BE.

Your drinking examples are absolutely great! The same person, a black
DJ on XPRS, a 100,000-watt Texas station broadcasting from Mexico in
order to bypass the U.S. 50,000-watt limit (I listened to the station
when I lived in L.A.!) used examples 2a-b on successive nights on his
show, The Blues Express. (Get it: eXPReSs? har! har!)

IAC, I've long felt that, since potato chips can be eaten as
individual, not-necessarily-though-possibly, unbroken units, whereas
it's unlikely that even a White Castle is eaten in a single gulp, let
alone a Big Mac, it's this latter that motivates the use of _eating
on_. So also, though it's certainly possible to toss down an alcoholic
beverage in a single gulp, that's not the default case. Normally, you
be dranking on you a liquid - you know, like, sipping on you a drank -
like you be eating on you a hamburger.

--
-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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