"They was trying to hand me out a flyer."

[Baker, John]

        All of these work for me as a speaker of American English, at
least in informal contexts.  Why does "hand me out a flyer" throw me for
a loop?


John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Stone, William
Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2011 11:11 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: "They was trying to hand me out a flyer."

As a speaker of standard and rural non-standard southern British
English, I find myself in total agreement with Damien. Whenever a
phrasal verb becomes ditransitive by the addition of an indirect object,
it is inserted between the verb and the particle as in the examples
below.

Could you hand me down that book?
I'll fry you up some eggs.
She wrote me down a list of chores.

The indirect object doesn't even have to be a pronoun.
Pick Carol up some asprin at the chemist.

Dr. William J. Stone
Associate Professor
TESL Ptogram
Northeastern Illinois University
Chicago
________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Damien Hall [D.Hall at KENT.AC.UK]
Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2011 8:50 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: "They was trying to hand me out a flyer."

George said:

'Is "hand me out" really common in England?'

Yes - and in the rest of the UK (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland)
as well.  Well, I'd say 'hand out a flyer to me' would be the majority
variant, but 'hand me out a flyer' is a pretty common minority variant,
maybe commoner in production in the North of England than elsewhere, and
I don't think it would be thought of as especially unusual by any native
speaker of BrE that heard it.

So, sentences like the following made-up ones are completely acceptable
to me (Standard Southern British English, brought up in London, but with
lots of family in the North):

'The doctor wrote me out a prescription.'

'I'm waiting for him to send me that back' ( = 'send back that [thing]
to me')

etc etc.

There has been some work done on the acceptability of these sentences, I
think by Bill Haddican (then of the University of York, which is in the
North of England, of course; now of CUNY Queens) - he would have done it
exactly because Americans can't usually produce sentences like that (and
he is American).  I'll ask him whether he has any results from it.

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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