ATEG Members,

I don't know whether anyone has covered this in the lengthy discussion
of indirect objects, but in Appalachian dialects, especially, but also
in the dialect of many South Midland speakers, indirect object are quite
prevalent in speech. You hear structures like:

                   I'm going to get me a switch and whip you.
                   I got me a new car today.
                   He had him a good time at the dance.

Is there anybody else out there who has noticed the same constructions
in other dialects?

Best wishes,

Marshall
Eastern Kentucky University

Edward Vavra wrote:

>     As an instructor of Freshman comp at the college level, I found
>this thread on indirect objects very interesting, especially since I
>have also been struggling with the teaching of grammar for almost a
>quarter of a century. What interested me most is that I literally tell
>my students that I do not care if they label indirect objects as direct.
>
>     As many contributors to this thread noted, students enter our
>classrooms with almost no formal knowledge of grammar. As some
>contributors noted, indirect objects give students few, if any,
>practical problems. Meanwhile, many students have problems with
>subject/verb agreement because they cannot identify verbs. (Two-thirds
>of my students enter the course unable to identify "is," "are," "was"
>and "were" as verbs.) Thus, to me, it seems absolutely senseless to try
>to teach them to identify indirect objects.
>     I must admit that, in trying to develop a consistent, systematic
>approach to teaching grammar (KISS) that begins in grade three and ends
>in grade eleven, I have for several years been working in neutral in my
>own courses. I had material that I used with my students, but I
>considered abandoning the teaching of grammar because it was not working
>to my satisfaction. In end of course evaluations, however, my students
>overwhelmingly voted that I should not abandon it; instead they wanted
>more examples and explanations. I have therefore been revising that
>material. See:
>http://home.pct.edu/~evavra/ENL111/Syntax/50Lessons/index.htm
>
>   The new approach is costing me a lot of time, and it has been
>driving the tutors in our Tutoring Center crazy, but more students seem
>not only to be getting it, but also to be appreciating it. (Of course,
>some students simply don't do the work, but there is little I can do
>about that.) What I want to suggest here, however, is that students
>appreciate it because we begin with the psycholinguistic model, not with
>grammar. The approach also focuses on analyzing real, randomly selected
>sentences, and not on learning definitions of grammatical terms. Thus
>students are studying how their minds, and the minds of their readers,
>are processing sentences. The most interesting, and most important work
>involves clauses. The Fifty exercises are not yet complete, but if you
>look at them, you will see that we get into questions of clause-boundary
>errors, style, and logic fairly quickly. This is what catches students'
>attention and makes the grammar meaningful to them. They are
>particularly fascinated when they see that the errors they have been
>making (such as comma-splices) can be resolved in a number of different
>ways (colons, dashes, semicolons, subordinate conjunctions), each of
>which changes the focus of the sentence.
>
>     As with the KISS Grammar site, anyone is free to use, adapt, etc.
>the materials I have on the web, and suggestions are always welcome.
>Ed V.
>
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>
>

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