Your mam told my aunt told me

[kay at cogsci.berkeley.edu]

On Thu, 15 Aug 2002, Dick Hudson wrote:

> Tibor thinks this is American:
> (1)	Your mam told my aunt told me
> Georgia denies all knowledge. I wonder if it's English-wide non-standard,
> where subject relatives are allowed to have zero relative pronoun; i.e.
> it's structurally like (2).
> (2)	Your mam told my aunt who told me
> This pattern is almost possible in UK standard in existentials:
> (3)	There's a man outside wants to see you.
>
> Dick
>
> Richard (= Dick) Hudson
>
> Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London,
> Gower Street, London WC1E  6BT.
> +44(0)20 7679 3152; fax +44(0)20 7383 4108;
> http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
>

Dick's (3) is definitely American. I won't attempt to judge standard or
not.  Knud Lambrecht has written about this construction, but I'm too
rushed to stop what I'm doing now and chase down the reference. My
recollection, though, is that according to Knud existential or
presentational meaning, or something in that general line of work, is
essential. It seems that way to me, too.  So Tibor's exx sound as exotic
to me as they do to Georgia.

Paul
 __________________________________________________________
 Paul Kay                      Department of Linguistics
 kay at cogsci.berkeley.edu       University of California
 www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay    Berkeley, CA 94720, USA