Linguistics

813 readers

1 users here now

Welcome to the community about the science of human Language!

Everyone is welcome here: from laypeople to professionals, Historical linguists to discourse analysts, structuralists to generativists.

Rules:

Instance rules apply.
Be reasonable, constructive, and conductive to discussion.
Stay on-topic, specially for more divisive subjects. And avoid unnecessary mentioning topics and individuals prone to derail the discussion.
Post sources when reasonable to do so. And when sharing links to paywalled content, provide either a short summary of the content or a freely accessible archive link.
Avoid crack theories and pseudoscientific claims.
Have fun!

Related communities:

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Personal datives | Yale Grammatical Diversity Project: English in North America (ygdp.yale.edu)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

6 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Native English speakers, how do you use personal datives? Today I came across an interesting text on the phenomenon here. Here are some examples from the text:

4] a. I got me some candy.

b. You got you some candy.

c. We got us some candy.

5] a. He got him some candy.

b. She got her some candy.

c. *It got it some candy.

d. They got them some candy.

(5c is marked with * to mark its grammatical unacceptability)

As a non-native speaker, I find sentences (4a) and (4c) to be natural, although I'd probably never use them myself. However, other sentences are odd to me, and seem as if they would cause confusion, they could be interpreted as if the subject got the candy for someone else. (4b), with 'you', is even more odd to my ears, even though a cited study says it is much more common than 3rd person constructions.

How do you perceive these sentences, are they all acceptable/natural to you?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

As a non-native, to me 4 is understandable but 5 is unclear. Because it's quite possible that some third person is involved there. If I had to translate from Turkish, I'd say this: "I got myself some candy."