Is this a good sentence?

[Laurence Horn]

On Jan 18, 2013, at 10:56 AM, Joel S. Berson wrote:

> This is so far out of my dialect that I feel I'm
> again in the Northern Scottish Isles and can't
> understand the speaker.  Please translate into
> standard New Yorkese (my dialect is pretty circumcised):
>
> "I love me some him."

'I love him' (but the personal dative does contribute a nuance typically described as "subject involvement" or "benefactive", which is why "I hate me some him" is much more marked)

> "This is dedicated to those who love themselves some heavy metal."
or as noted, "…to those who love them some heavy metal", which is more natural for the actual dialects in which this construction is at home

Again, just delete the pseudo-indirect-object.

You can if you like this of this as the transitive counterpart of "Now I lay me down to sleep" or "Hie thee hence", and there are many cross-linguistic analogues (as in French "Je me bois un verre")--all discussed in more detail than you want at the below links.

LH

>
> Thanks
> Joel
>
> At 1/18/2013 09:32 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>> On Jan 18, 2013, at 7:15 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>>
>> >> "I love me some him."
>> >
>> > If anybody ever said that, I'd vote it QOTY.
>> >
>> > Who's the verbal genius/moron responsible?
>> >
>> > JL
>>
>> “I Love Me Some Him”, rendition by Toni Braxto,
>> nlyrics by SoulShock & Karlin, Andrea Martin,
>> and Gloria Stewart, with the chorus
>>
>> I love me some him
>> I’ll never love this way again
>> I love me some you
>> Another man will never do
>>
>> reached the top of the charts in 1997, and has
>> been a snowclone ever since (try googling "I
>> love me some").  It's also the title of an
>> obscure 2008 paper ('"I love me some him": the
>> landscape of non-argument datives') by some
>> linguist or other, but s/he's probably not the
>> genius/moron you're referring to. Cf.
>> http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1868 for related discussion.
>>
>> LH
>>
>> >
>> > On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 12:25 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> >> -----------------------
>> >> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> >> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
>> >> Subject:      Re: Is this a good sentence?
>> >>
>> >>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> >>
>> >> 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
>> >>
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>> >>
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > --
>> > "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>> >
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>>
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>
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