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

submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/linguistics@mander.xyz

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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?

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[–] muhyb@programming.dev 2 points 6 days 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."