tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post2510268449306981573..comments2024-03-28T16:11:36.465+00:00Comments on Separated by a Common Language: She gave it melynneguisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10171345732985610861noreply@blogger.comBlogger26125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-68570885950243227422021-11-17T00:20:01.634+00:002021-11-17T00:20:01.634+00:00I was wondering if the construction, 'give it ...I was wondering if the construction, 'give it me' could be used with nouns as well as pronouns. Can you say for example, 'Give it Jane', or how about 'Mary is a nice name, I would like to give it a girl (if a were to have another daughter)'?David Crowtherhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07748442901417104175noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-90215258243210788072018-02-26T15:32:40.562+00:002018-02-26T15:32:40.562+00:00I'm from the States, and I think that "sh...I'm from the States, and I think that "she gave it me" sounds more intelligent. Frequently, concision sounds more intelligent than wordiness. But I don't say "she gave it me," because it sounds British to me, and that's not how I talk. Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-52096951203102778032017-09-19T15:40:02.283+01:002017-09-19T15:40:02.283+01:00'They gave it me',
said Humpty-Dumpty; no...'They gave it me',<br /> said Humpty-Dumpty; nothing substandard there, but perhaps now old-fashioned.Leofranchttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01327483077083744883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-44901763943396258242016-03-31T22:13:06.267+01:002016-03-31T22:13:06.267+01:00so, i'm from the US but lived in the UK for ne...so, i'm from the US but lived in the UK for nearly 20 years...and I learned "give it me" while in London, from a colleague who is from Leicester....I assumed it was East Midlands dialect...certainly, it is not standard british english!!!Veena Vasistahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08351304895027229466noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-21667193793013766872015-03-19T22:03:31.187+00:002015-03-19T22:03:31.187+00:00Seems to common in NW England: http://projects.alc...Seems to common in NW England: http://projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk/ukdialectmaps/syntactic-variation/give-it-me/ … Zoom in to get a clearer look.AnWulfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14561827352709157334noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-23919998361175042782013-12-27T20:45:14.433+00:002013-12-27T20:45:14.433+00:00Mythoman
You could say “Sollen wir Josef Adam ver...Mythoman<br /><br /><i>You could say “Sollen wir Josef Adam verkaufen?” and it would not be quite clear who we should sell to whom.</i><br /><br />Well it would, actually. Not to eavesdroppers, probably, but the question would not be uttered unless the identities were clear to the <b>addressee</b>.<br /><br />In English <i>'We sold Joseph Adam'</i> seems extremely odd. Even a bit if context doesn't help —<i>'Back in slavery times my great grandfather sold Joseph Adam'</i> won't do either. You need to use a preposition <i>'sold Adam to Joseph'</i> or an explanatory co-text <i>'sold Joseph a slave called Adam'</i>.<br /><br />But turn the sentence into a question, then the reader/hearer who encounters the sentence does not feel obliged interpret immediately. It would serve as the first sentence of a narrative — inviting the reader to read on and make sense of the question. Better still with an unexplained definite time adverbial: <i>'That day we sold Joseph Adam'</i>.<br /><br />In most 'ditransitive' clauses (=with two Objects) it's semantically obvious which is the beneficiary and which is the benefit. The fixed word order <b>confirms</b> the roles, but the conformation is generally redundant. <br /><br />That's why we have no semantic need either where it's optional as in<br /><i>Give it me / Give me it<br />my wife had bought it me / bought me it<br />offering to show it me / show me it</i><br /><br />or where it's syntactically necessary as in<br /><i>We sold our neighbour Josep a slave called Adam</i>.David Crosbiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01858358459416955921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-68011668648540001792013-12-26T12:54:44.201+00:002013-12-26T12:54:44.201+00:00In German something similar to this is possible wi...In German something similar to this is possible with proper names which aren’t necessarily marked for case. You could say “Sollen wir Josef Adam verkaufen?” and it would not be quite clear who we should sell to whom.<br /><br />If the context isn’t obvious it is of course more natural to resolve this ambiguity by saying something like “Sollen wir den Josef dem Adam verkaufen?” (=Joseph to Adam) or “Sollen wir dem Josef den Adam verkaufen?” (=Adam to Joseph) or “Sollen wir Josef an Adam verkaufen?” (=Joseph to Adam).Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-89482491436414504262013-12-25T12:43:20.608+00:002013-12-25T12:43:20.608+00:00Lynne
Because Modern English doesn't mark cas...Lynne<br /><br /><i>Because Modern English doesn't mark case on regular nouns and only distinguishes subjective (nominative), objective (accusative/dative) and genitive (possessive) on pronouns, we rely on word order to let us know which semantic roles and grammatical relations the nouns are serving.</i><br /><br />That <i>'because'</i> does seem logical, and certainly it's what I was taught. But it seems it isn't as simple as that.<br /><br />I checked Leofranc's generalisation about Old English word order in <i>The Cambridge Syntax Guide: The Syntax of Early English</i>. They report that IO-DO word order didn't become fixed in English until the late fourteenth century. But Dative case forms had been merged with Accusative forms in Middle English. Even if the distinction wasn't abolished overnight in 1066, it disappeared centuries before fixed word over took over. The example they give of DO-IO is:<br /><br /><i>Wolle we sullen Iosep þis chapmen that here come?</i><br />'Shall we sell Joseph to those merchants that have come here?'<br /><br />Both 'Joseph' and 'these merchants' are in the consolidated Objective case. Fortunately, any medieval reader or hearer would know from the bible story that there was no question of selling the merchants to Joseph.<br /><br />OK, we rely on fixed word order <b>now</b>, but our ancestors got on without it.<br /><br />(Apparently, there's a link with the rise of the construction <i>I was given a new bluetooth headset.</i> They seem to be implying a <b>causal</b> link, but I'm not sure what exactly is supposed to have caused what.)David Crosbiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01858358459416955921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-21241129906587909892013-12-25T01:59:43.712+00:002013-12-25T01:59:43.712+00:00Another afterthought... The it-Object-second const...Another afterthought... The <i>it</i>-Object-second construction only seems to work when the pronouns are redundant (in a good sense) anyway. Both <i>Give it me!</i> and <i>Give me it!</i> are super-explicit ways of saying what would be as clear with <i>Give me!</i> or even <i>Give!</i>. In the context, the speaker is the only plausible beneficiary.<br /><br />Thus in Lynne's examples<br /><br />1. <i><b>I</b> lost <b>my</b> new bluetooth headset. I was gutted, <b>my wife</b> had just bought it me <b>as a Xmas present</b> and <b>I</b> had lost it.</i><br />Multiple signals as to who the recipient of the headset was, so <i>My wife had just bought it</i> would have conveyed sufficient information. <i>It</i> is also semantically unnecessary, but is demanded by the syntax of <i>buy</i>.<br /><br />2. <i>asking <b>me</b> if <b>I</b> knew this or that model, offering to show it me so that <b>we</b> could do it later in the class... </i><br />Again multiple signs of who might be given a demonstration. Again <i>show it so that we could ...</i> would be clear, if stylistically awkward. <i>Show so we could</i> might or might not communicate the information, since the listener might take it as an intransitive use of <i>show</i> such as 'put in an appearance'.David Crosbiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01858358459416955921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-53525642805058038942013-12-25T01:58:08.876+00:002013-12-25T01:58:08.876+00:00Anonymous
Moving to University from Nottingham (E...Anonymous<br /><br /><i>Moving to University from Nottingham (East Midlands, England) to Southampton on the south coast, people started pointing out when I said 'give it me'.</i><br /><br />I was interested to read this because I'm also from Nottingham. Although I don't personally say <i>Give it me</i>, it does sound sort-of acceptable; now I know why.<br /><br />(Or perhaps I <b>do</b> say <i>Give it me</i> without realising it.)<br /><br />Mind you, I wouldn't feel nearly so comfortable with <i>Give them me</i> or <i>Show him her</i> (meaning 'show him to her'). And I suspect very strongly that even in Nottingham it's <i>Give us them</i>, not <i>Give them us</i>.<br /><br />More generally, <i>it</i> is essentially a so-called <b>clitic</b> pronoun (= it tags onto words rather than standing alone) and hardly ever carries stress. At least in my dialect you can never point at something and say <i><b>It's</b> the thing</i>; you have to say something like <i><b>That's</b> the thing</i>. Stressing the determiner (article-like) <i>its</i> before a noun is (for me) very difficult; I could only say <i>Here's my badge, but where's <b>its</b> badge</i> by slowing down and making a meal of it. And stressing pronoun <i>its</i> in e.g. <i>It's <b>its</b></i> is impossible; I'd have to say something like <i><b>That's</b> what it belongs to</i>.<br /><br />So the stress-resistant clitic can, in some dialects, attach to the verb as a unit, allowing the slightly more stress able pronoun to follow. For me, it's only <i>it</i> that seems weak enough — thus allowing <b>only</b> <i>Give it me, I'll give it you, Give it him, Give it us</i> and <i>Give it them</i>.<br /><br />Come to think of it, there's an even weaker pronoun form spelled <i>'em</i>. I don't remember hearing <i>Give 'em me</i>, but I suppose it's a fair possibility.David Crosbiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01858358459416955921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-25109866626842944052013-12-23T21:32:25.943+00:002013-12-23T21:32:25.943+00:00'He gave it me' = German er gab es mir. in...'He gave it me' = German <i>er gab es mir</i>. in accordance with West Germanic word order. 'He gave me it' = Danish <i>han gav mig det</i>, hence likelier (in England) in an area of Viking setlement such as Lancashire.Leofranc Holford-Strevensnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-24599549930272182132013-01-27T17:17:11.888+00:002013-01-27T17:17:11.888+00:00I'm from South Manchester on the border of Che...I'm from South Manchester on the border of Cheshire and Lancashire but have recently moved down to Cambridge for uni. My friend here pointed out that I always say "gave it me" rather than "gave it to me" or any other variation, but until then I had never realised that the phrase wasn't used by everyone or was even considered ungrammatical or uneducated. At home no one would bat an eye lid if you said "gave it me", "gave her me" (if you were talking about a doll for instance), "gave him me", "gave them me" (shoes etc.) but to say "gave the cake me" or "gave the present me" would be weird and 'incorrect'. Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-29427265555702710292010-12-17T07:37:41.184+00:002010-12-17T07:37:41.184+00:00Not sure if this is related, but my dad (American ...Not sure if this is related, but my dad (American from Chicago) used to say the expression "She borrowed me the book" to mean "She lent the book to me."Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-80075197415291867882009-12-16T17:07:36.042+00:002009-12-16T17:07:36.042+00:00No one seems to have mentioned that (at least in t...No one seems to have mentioned that (at least in the US) "give it me" would be misinterpreted with "me" as the direct object and "it" as the dative, as in "his dog needed someone to bother, so he gave it me" (ok, so you can make up a better example)Boris Zakharinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16560756640621720539noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-14535524034843711922009-09-19T18:45:24.311+01:002009-09-19T18:45:24.311+01:00"Give it me", "I'll get it you ..."Give it me", "I'll get it you later", "I sent it him" etc. are perfectly correct English. Just because these constructions have fallen out of use in certain parts of England, that doesn't mean that they're wrong. I worked for years in the S.E. of England, and people kept picking me up on these things; I just ignored them. I'm glad to be back again in the N.W., where people speak properly.William from Merseysidenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-74545468279386635102009-05-19T16:12:00.000+01:002009-05-19T16:12:00.000+01:00Moving to University from Nottingham(East Midlands...Moving to University from Nottingham(East Midlands, England) to Southampton on the south coast, people started pointing out when I said 'give it me'. To me it sounds equally correct either way, but I will always drop the 'to' in conversation(despite constantly being told I am wrong).Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-37403458013241352982008-01-12T00:56:00.000+00:002008-01-12T00:56:00.000+00:00As an aside, Canadians say "are you done your home...As an aside, Canadians say "are you done your homework?" and "I'm done my supper, may I be excused?" which to my AmE ear sounds clunky.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-2106117780254141702008-01-11T23:27:00.000+00:002008-01-11T23:27:00.000+00:00As a Brit, I've only ever heard "give it me" comin...As a Brit, I've only ever heard "give it me" coming from the mouths of the ill-educated; and even then only in cases where the phrase was used as an order (as in "give it me, you [insert course language of choice]").Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03710479827043678322noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-22824141410218052572008-01-07T21:27:00.000+00:002008-01-07T21:27:00.000+00:00This is certainly something I never learned in sch...This is certainly something I never learned in school/college (as a Dane), but I know I've picked it up somewhere along the way, because the DO-IO is my preferred version now. It simply 'feels' more natural - less 'stilted'.<BR/><BR/>But as with so many other things I can't consciously recall when, where or from whom I picked it up. Only that at some point I was aware of the novelty and consciously adopted.<BR/><BR/>It may be as late as when I started chatting, which would support the Northern origen, since most of my (early) contacts are Northerners.<BR/><BR/>I have shared labs and offices with people from and/or trained in the North before that, so it may be older in my idiom ...Jens Knudsen (Sili)https://www.blogger.com/profile/14078875730565068352noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-8000047032761115242008-01-04T20:36:00.000+00:002008-01-04T20:36:00.000+00:00Definitely not Scottish, Ginger, or to be more pre...Definitely not Scottish, Ginger, or to be more precise I never heard it growing up with ScE, except from English people on TV, and never in RP accents as far as I can recall. It feels northern English to me, although that is just a personal impression of it.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-57471717631818492962008-01-02T22:41:00.000+00:002008-01-02T22:41:00.000+00:00As a north easetern American, I've never heard thi...As a north easetern American, I've never heard this construction. It sounds odd to my ears with out the "it."Sterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08856854126127258353noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-39214493093505532102008-01-02T10:14:00.000+00:002008-01-02T10:14:00.000+00:00It's mainly a Scots thing, isn't it? With some cur...It's mainly a Scots thing, isn't it? With some currency further south as well, but not common past Yorkshire, as far as I can tell.Ginger Yellowhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06103410278129312943noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-2989101902076731152007-12-31T14:50:00.000+00:002007-12-31T14:50:00.000+00:00Here is a small but possibly dumb question, does t...Here is a small but possibly dumb question, does the Somerfield Supermarket sell dresses? Or is the dress mentioned in the commercial not really the point?<BR/><BR/>Becasue if the supermarket sells dresses, there is a post in there somewhere, and I haven'nt seen that topic on your blog as of yet...Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-32519824883037532032007-12-29T13:47:00.000+00:002007-12-29T13:47:00.000+00:00I'm a BrE speaker and can just about imagine sayin...I'm a BrE speaker and can just about imagine saying 'give it me' or perhaps 'tell it me straight' but I agree it isn't 'standard' English. Couldn't this construction be a written-down version of sloppy speech? In certain areas and classes (esp east Midlands of England) the word 'the' is pronounced t' or "tut" - as in DH Lawrence novels. We know that "today" and "tomorrow" arose from "the day" and "the morrow". The phrase 'Give it t'me' requires two adjacent consonants, and could thus become elided and written down as 'give it me'...<BR/><BR/>Constructions with other prepositions would then be made in parallel to the 'to me' type - for example I heard 'Let me choose you another track on the new CD' on Radio 3 today.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-27503845287162157522007-12-24T13:56:00.000+00:002007-12-24T13:56:00.000+00:00My north London native variety (from the 1940s and...My north London native variety (from the 1940s and 50s) had IO-DO order in these double object constructions with personal pronouns, that is: "gave me it", "send you them", etc. But later, maybe through conversation with various northern BrE speakers, or maybe specifically working in Liverpool for 16 years, the other order, DO-IO when the DO is "it", has become familiar and I believe I say it sometimes. There's quite a lot of interesting literature in the linguistic typology/cognitive linguistic field about various principles favouring ordering of two object NPs, that is DO and IO.Max Wheelerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08488671125464364189noreply@blogger.com