Is this a good sentence?

[Jonathan Lighter]

So it's ineligible for QOTY.

Damn.

JL

On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 12:10 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Is this a good sentence?
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Jan 18, 2013, at 11:49 AM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>
> > At 1/18/2013 11:04 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
> >> 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
> >
> > You're right.  But I have another
> > question.  Although Larry has also dropped the
> > "some", is there a difference between "I love me
> > some him." and "I love me all him."?
> >
> Yes, the difference is the latter basically doesn't occur.  The constraint
> usually (but not always) observed in these personal datives is that the
> direct object must have an indefinite or existential determiner/article
> attached, so the "some" in such cases isn't really partitive, whether it
> occurs with a pronoun (Braxton's "I love me some him", or Terrell Owens' "I
> love me some me"), a proper name ("I love me some Jude Law", "My husband
> used to love him some Jack Daniels" —Halle Berry’s character to Billy Bob
> Thornton’s, "Monster’s Ball", "I love me some Crocodile Hunter"--reported
> here a while back by Mark Mandel), or a common noun phrase ("I love me a
> big man", "I love me some fat bitches", both attested, expressing a
> positive attitude toward generic large men and full-sized women
> respectively).   The "some" and "a" are only here in such cases because of
> the personal dative.  Thus we find a post beginning this way:  "I just love
> me some cats! Don’t you just LOVe cats?!…": !
>   when the PD pronoun "me" is dropped, so is the "some".  (Sorry, the link
> is dead.)
>
> What we don't get, or at least from most PD speakers, is definites ("I
> love me the/that big man") or universals ("I love me all cats", "I love me
> all him"), or bare plurals ("I love me big men").  There's some variation
> on this, but crucially "I love me some him" doesn't suggest that I love
> some parts of him and maybe not others, it basically just means I love him.
>  (There is at least one paper arguing that the "some", "a" in such cases
> isn't as semantically empty as I'm claiming, but this is probably more
> detail than you want already.)
>
> LH
>
>
>
> LH
>
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