Re: THEORY: more questions

Quoting Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>:

> Quoting Tristan McLeay <zsau@...>:
>
> > On Tue, 25 Nov 2003, Costentin Cornomorus wrote:
> >
> > > I'm not sure what's wrong with "give it me".
> >
> > Mostly the semantics. It's unlikely you're going to tell someone to give
> > you to something. With no 'to', the two consecutive nouns go IO DO.
>
> I can just immagine some melodramatic Fantasy movie, in which a daemonic
> being
> demands a human to eat in return for not making whatever other nefarious
> thing
> it was planning to do, and some selfless (probably female) sidekick tells
> the
> (undoubtedy male) hero that; "give it me!".
Interestingly, I think that animacy has a lot to do with it here. To my
intuition, when using the IO syntax, the indirect object must be of higher
animacy than the direct object. Look at the following examples.

I gave the car a quart of oil.
I gave it a quart.
*I gave the car it.

They sent me an assistant.
They sent me her.
They sent me you.
They sent you her.
?They sent you me.
*They sent the manager her.
*They sent him her.

They sent the cult a sacrifice.
?They sent it me.
*They sent the cult me.

Actually, maybe this isn't animacy after all. The point is that if the DO is a
pronoun, the IO must also be a pronoun; conversely, you can't have a full noun
phrase as an IO if the following DO is a pronoun. If both are pronouns, the IO
should be on the left side of this continuum: 1 < 2 < 3.

Of course, your dialect does it differently. But this shows that there *is*
some sense to it.


--
JS Bangs
jaspax@glossopoesis.org

"We're counting on our virtues
   Because it's too hard to count the dead."
     -Jason Webley