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

[Jonathan Lighter]

But "stay y'all ass.." is precisely one third as weird to me as once would
have been "Anymore, y'all might should stay y'all ass on your back."

JL

On Thu, Nov 24, 2016 at 11:01 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
>> >
>> > ------------------------------------------------------------
>> > The American Dialect Society - https://urldefense.proofpoint.
>> com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.americandialect.org&d=CwIBaQ&c=-
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>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
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>>
>
>
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>



-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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