Is this a good sentence?

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Fri Jan 18 05:25:42 UTC 2013


On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 10:41 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> 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").


Once thar you've explained it, it has become transparent! Well done! ;-)

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list