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

[Laurence Horn]

I’m pretty sure that’s true, both for “want for to VP” and for other “for to” constructions including purpose clauses (= ‘in order to’). In one of our recent surveys at the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project, we found Southern and South Midland hot spots for the sentence “He turned off his phone for to avoid his girlfriend” (as the literature predicts), but there were quite a number of positive responses scattered across the Northeast--not so many further west.  

LH

> On Jan 1, 2017, at 1:04 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> 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
>> 
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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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> The American Dialect Society - https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.americandialect.org&d=CwIBaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=wFp3X4Mu39hB2bf13gtz0ZpW1TsSxPIWYiZRsMFFaLQ&m=PSFrCYRyBJckzMwXOgERerPpPWXDARygBQ_irpRxG3I&s=iRncnHYdoeqWrfI6thtkD6vfCXCxGM6YEWjA3MYjHhU&e= 

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