[Ads-l] Facebookery: "Stay _y'all ass_ on your back!!!"

[Jonathan Lighter]

See HDAS.

JL

On Thu, Nov 24, 2016 at 9:12 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> > On Nov 23, 2016, at 11:28 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Nov 23, 2016 at 9:39 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> Not in what would be considered "standard English", but in other
> varieties
> >> as an intransitive counterpart of the personal dative we've discussed in
> >> various threads, a natural construction in Black and/or Southern and
> >> Appalachian varieties ("She needs her a new pick-up truck", "(You
> should)
> >> get you a laser printer", "Don't you love you any man."
> >>
> >
> > "All that's good," to use a blast from the past, but your ass has no
> > equivalent outside of BE for the highlighted phrase in
> >
> > "If she leaves him in the morning, _her [wishy-washy] ass_ will be drawn
> > back into the marriage by noon!"
> >
> > I'm struck by a thought. Maybe _self_ is the standard equivalent:
> >
> > "If she leaves him in the morning, _her [wishy-washy] self_ will be drawn
> > back into the marriage by noon!"
>
>
> There are a couple of papers on that "X's ass" construction (standing in
> both for reflexives and ordinary pronouns)--
>
> Beavers, John and Andrew Koontz-Garboden. 2006. A universal pronoun in
> English? Linguistic Inquiry 37:503–513.
>
> Collins, Chris, Simanique Moody & Paul Postal. 2008. An AAE camouflage
> construction. Language 84: 29–68.
>
> And there's also this on the quite different adjectival -ass suffix ("Get
> that ugly-ass junk out of here"):
>
> Irwin, Patricia. 2015. Expressive meaning in an AAE attributive
> construction.  Language Sciences 50: 12–29.
>
> I touch briefly on the relation between "X's ass" and personal datives (as
> we were discussing upthread) in
>
> Horn, Laurence. 2008. I love me some him: The landscape of non-argument
> datives. In O. Bonami & P. Cabredo Hofherr (eds.), Empirical Issues in
> Syntax and Semantics 7, 169-192 (http://www.cssp.cnrs.fr/
> eiss7/horn-eiss7.pdf).
>
> where I cite attested examples "God loves his ass some kidneys" (= 'God
> loves kidneys') and "I need my ass some gingko biloba".
>
> LH
>
> >
> > That works for me only just in case that "wishy-washy" is present.
> >
> > "Stay yourselves on your backs!"
> >
> > That's out on the bleeding edge. I'd probably give it a straight-up fail,
> > if I hadn't had a few hours to become accustomed to it.
> >
> > Oh, well.
> >
> > Youneverknow.
> >
> > --
> > -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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