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

[Laurence Horn]

On Jul 12, 2011, at 10:25 AM, Neal Whitman wrote:

> I remember a song in Sunday school as a kid, one line of which went, "Hand me down my silver trumpet, Gabriel."


or "Hand me down my walking cane", from another song.  But these are both "hand down *to* me", with the pronoun as recipient, while the "hand me out a flyer" involves a kind of benefactive, one closer to the "ethical dative" in German, French, and many other languages, a kind of secondary beneficiary affected by but not intimately connected to the action.  In other languages, this is freer ("You need to do me your homework").  This isn't, however, the "personal dative" of southern/mountain U.S. English, which is coreferential with the subject ("She needs her a new pickup truck").

LH


> I found the syntax interesting at the time. Not actually bad, but interesting because of the garden-path effect of "hand me down," which I suspect is the same thing going on when "hand me out a flyer" sounds odd.
>
> Neal
>
> On Jul 12, 2011, at 9:50 AM, Damien Hall <D.Hall at KENT.AC.UK> wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Damien Hall <D.Hall at KENT.AC.UK>
>> 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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