[Ads-l] Heard: "want _for_ you to do"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Sounds pretty normal to me, though not in my idiotlect.

Mainly a Southern/ South Midland feature?

JL

On Fri, Dec 30, 2016 at 3:53 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> For dekkids, I've had an inkling in the back of my thinking-cap that, at
> some point in my life, perhaps when I was a child in Texas, I and the
> people around me used the structure
>
> "_want *for*_ [Noun Phrase] to Verb"
>
> and not simply
>
> "_want_ [Noun Phrase] to Verb"
>
> But it was just a vague feeling and nobody around me now uses it and I
> don't use it, even by mistake. It just pops into my head, from time to
> time.
>
> I've just heard Dr. Phil, also a native of Texas, say,
>
> "What I want _for_ you to do is to follow the plan that I'm going to set up
> for you."
>
> --
> -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
>



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

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