Your mam told my aunt told me

[Dick Hudson]

Dear Georgia, Paul and Carl,
You may be right, in fact I think you probably are right:  Tibor's examples
belong to a specialised construction like the examples Carl quotes, where a
NP doubles as object of one verb and subject of the next. (This is actually
a recognised speech error, called blending, and it's easy to see how it
could get grammaticised in a kind of serial-verb pattern.)
	However I don't think we've quite eliminated my relative-clause
explanation yet. There are several  (UK) non-standard dialects in which
zero subject relatives are ok in *non-existential* clauses. Trudgill quotes:
(0a)	That was the man done it. [done = did]
Harris gives this (for Ireland): [sounds rather like Georgia'sexample]
(0b)	Any man had a thatched roof he knew how to thatch.
and this is from southern English English (Edwards):
(0c)	They're still building them high rise flats are going up all over the
place.
I wonder how you can be sure that none such exist in USA. Of course Tibor
is the ultimate judge: does he mix with non-standard speakers?
	In the long run I'm not sure that we can be sure that these explanations
are totally unrelated because relative clauses are one way of chaining events:
	She told him who told his father who told his colleagues ...
This could be one of those cases where two different syntactic analyses
produce just the same semantics and it's impossible to choose between them.
	Dick
Dick

At 14:54 15/08/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>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
>
>
>
>

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