personal dative

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English[edit]

Examples

I love me some coffee.

Noun[edit]

personal dative (plural personal datives)

  1. (grammar) A grammatical construction emphasizing subject involvement, associated with Southern American English, consisting of a pronoun that occurs immediately after a verb and is coreferential with the subject.
    • 1976 June, Waft Wolfram, Donna Christian, Appalachian Speech, Arlington, Va.: Center for Applied Linguistics, →ISBN, →LCCN, page 122:
      There are certain general observations which can be made about this construction, which will be referred to here as the “personal dative,” although its exact distribution is somewhat difficult to pin down. [] Personal datives are restricted to animate referents.

Further reading[edit]

  • Nick Huang, Tom McCoy (2011 June 11) “Personal datives”, in Yale Grammatical Diversity Project: English in North America, Yale University, retrieved 2024-03-30