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?
Native (midwestern American) English speaker here.
They all sound a little humorous to me. As if the speaker is speaking kindof playfully. Maybe as if to a young child, or perhaps putting on a purposefully-funny (southern American?) accent.
But aside from that, they all sound quite natural to me and I could see myself using any/all of them if I was in a relatively playful mood.
Even 5c doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. (Maybe a pet of unknown gender got into the bag of candy? “Control your damned dog! It broke into my kitchen and it got it some candy out of my cupboard!”)
That said, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen an asterisk on a “grammatically incorrect” sentence/construction and thought “why did they mark that unacceptable?”
The list of sentences is reproduced from an another study, and the Yale page that I’ve linked does note that others have found examples of such constructions with ‘it’, so it is true that the asterisk might be unwarranted.
Thank you for the feedback, so basically you don’t perceive any difference between the sentences with regards to the person and number of the subject?
Oh, I guess one thing about 4b. Thinking more about 4b, I find I can’t really imagine it being said “you got you some candy” instead of “you gotchu some candy” or “you gotcha some candy”.
Also, leaving out the personal dative feels too formal to use with young kids unless being at least a little stern.
Oh, and aside from the obvious differences in the pronouns involved (“she” only refers to female subjects, “it” only for “things”… can you tell I’m not that knowledgeable on linguistics jargon, lol) I don’t really see much difference in who is referred to in those examples, nor in contrasting them with equivalent examples without the dative except for the aforementioned differences in formality and “playfulness”.
Just as additional info, as this doesn’t answer your question (sorry!):
I’ve seen constructions like this popping up in other languages, under different names. In Portuguese for example it’s called “pronome de interesse” (pronoun of interest) or “dativo ético” (ethical dative). Often used alongside commands, like this:
- Por favor, não [me]¹ conte [para os outros]² [o que aconteceu]³.
- Please, [for my sake]¹, don’t tell [the others]² [what happened]³.
I’ve tagged 1 = the ethic dative, 2 = the indirect object, and 3 = the direct object. Since the verb (contar, to tell) already got its two objects, that ⟨me⟩ cannot be an object requirement of the verb.
It’s typically associated with informal speech, but attested across multiple dialects (see e.g. this and this). And apparently it backtracks all the way into Latin.
German and Ancient Greek also show the same phenomenon.
Based on that I’d probably guess that what you’re seeing in English is the leftover of some really old feature, so it’ll probably surface across multiple dialects, even if Dixie English sticks with it a bit more.
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.”
