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

[Laurence Horn]

On Jul 12, 2011, at 7:02 PM, Arnold Zwicky wrote:

> 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.
>
Mebbe so.  I pictured myself in the truck with the hander-outer who was working for me, but if I was on the outside of the vehicle (or the house, or whatever), then I was the (intended) recipient and all bets are off.

LH

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