"I was sitting in my mother's lap and she was cutting _me_ some cake."

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:53 AM -0400 5/6/11, Wilson Gray wrote:
>On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 11:48 PM, John McChesney-Young
><jmccyoung at gmail.com> wrote:
>>  ---------------------- Information from the
>>mail header -----------------------
>>  Sender: ?  ?  ?  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>  Poster: ?  ?  ?  John McChesney-Young <jmccyoung at GMAIL.COM>
>>  Subject: ?  ?  ? Re: "I was sitting in my
>>mother's lap and she was cutting _me_
>>  ?  ?  ?  ?  ?  ?  ? some cake."
>>
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>  On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 7:23 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> noted
>>  this approximate quote by Tempe Brennan:
>>
>>>  ... Â "I was sitting in my mother's lap and she was cutting _me_ some
>>>  Â ? Â ? Â ? Â ? Â ? Â ? Â cake."
>>
>>  I myself find this construction unexceptional, and there are 898K raw
>>  Ghits for "cutting me some" -slack. A fair number in the first hundred
>>  are food-related (e.g., ham, bread, wedding cake, biscuits). Is
>>  "cutting some x for me" what you expect instead?
>>
>>  John
>>
>>
>>  --
>>  John McChesney-Young ** Berkeley, California, U.S.A.
>>  JMcCYoung~at~gmail.com ** http://twitter.com/jmccyoung **
>>  http://jmccyoung.blogspot.com/
>>
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>>  The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>
>Only 898K? Hit must not be no whole lot of Southern-English speakers
>doing no posting! ;-) The point isn't that such a string is of itself
>in any way strange. It's merely that a colleague here is interested in
>the syntax and semantics of such strings. Perhaps, in the future, I
>should post these random examples directly to him, in order to avoid
>confusion.
>
Are you sure the colleague isn't thinking of the
personal dative versions?  That would be, say,
"My mother was cutting her some cake", with
coreference, and crucially involving the
pronominal "her" rather than "herself" here.
That one is regionally/socially restricted.  I've
never encountered speakers who balked at "She was
cutting me some cake" with an ordinary
ditransitive indirect object, but then I may have
not noticed the balking.

LH

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