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

Arnold Zwicky zwicky at STANFORD.EDU
Tue Jul 12 23:02:27 UTC 2011


On Jul 12, 2011, at 11:25 AM, Larry Horn wrote:

> 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.

hmm.  not my reading, but by this time i've lost the context.  i thought it *was* a recipient construction.

arnold

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