Is this a good sentence?

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Fri Jan 18 03:41:23 UTC 2013


On Jan 17, 2013, at 10:22 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> "This is dedicated to those who love _themselves_ some heavy metal."
>
> --
> -Wilson

I'm not about "good" or "bad" when it's not my dialect, but my guess (in print a few years back) is that people who want to try out the personal dative because it's trendy ("I love me some him", "I love me some Wilson Gray", "He needs him a new pickup", etc.) but don't really control the construction end up using the reflexive (because they're used to using the reflexive in ordinary indirect object sentences ("He got himself a new pickup").  So the "correct" dialectal ordinary pronoun in the above sentence ("..to those who love them some heavy metal") is naturalized to the reflexive ("…to those who love themselves some heavy metal").

LH

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