Marshall,

I don't have that reference handy to check this further.  Do they say that sentences of this sort, let's say with "get", *never* occur without the personal dative (I do like the term)?  You suggest that they (who?) require it.  I have heard this construction, but I've also heard Appalachian English speakers say things like this without the extra pronoun.  I'm going to check with a couple of them next week when I get back to school.

It would be worth checking this sort of thing in an Appalachian English corpus, if one exists.

Herb


Herb,

Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian in APPALACHIAN ENGLISH refer to what they call the "personal dative" as in the following sentence taken from their book: "And then you'd get you a bowl of ice water."

I don't quite see how a construction could be declared optional to those who require it, as in Appalachian speech. It may be optional to you, but it is not to the Appalachian speakers who use it. 

I can see that in other dialects speakers would use "yourself" in place of "you" in the quoted sentence. But I don't think we can conclude that "you" is therefore optional.

I agree with Wolfram and Christiian, "personal dative" is an accurate term for such constructions.

Marshall

Stahlke, Herbert F.W. wrote:


This is not really an indirect object construction.  Rather, Appalachian substitutes the object pronoun for the reflexive.  Second, the first two instances look like they could be interpreted as IOs but are different in that they, actually all three, are optional, which IOs never are.  Third, there is another construction, rare in Standard English, called, at least by classical grammarians (Latin and Greek) the ethical dative.  Why "ethical" I've never understood.  Rather, they are a form of reference to the subject without using  a reflexive.



Herb Stahlke

Ball State University



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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