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Re: OT: All'y'all's's's's'...

From:Thomas Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Friday, May 13, 2005, 17:12
Sai wrote:
> Just how much can you funkify a plural and have it still be cogent? > > Or for that matter, comprehendible enough to be funny? > > I know I've heard "you", "y'all", "all y'all", "y'alls", and "all > y'alls" used straight, and with discrimination between them. (Add > plural for an extra 's.) Can anyone outdo me on that? :-P
Are you a native user of <y'all>? I ask, because it is very clear to this native user that <y'alls> (as you write it) is not a double marking of plural, but rather the possessive, and should include the apostrophe: "Y'all's party was a lot of fun last night". The fact that people say "all y'all" is not strange, either, given that every language that I know of that has a distinct second person plural pronoun also allows you to quantify it in some way. E.g. in Latin it was perfectly normal to say "vos omnes", literally "y'all all". Given that for me as for many y'all-users, "all of you" means "the entirety of your (sg.) body or person", and "all (of) y'all" is the normal way to refer to a large group, it is actually evidence that for these speakers <y'all> has been grammaticalized as a real pronoun, and is not just a cliticized contraction. However, I should say that I have heard nonnative speakers of a y'all-dialect use constructions like <y'all's's>, where there DOES seem to be some kind of double marking of the plural. Since I have never heard this from native speakers of the dialect, I can only presume that it involves some kind of hypercorrection on their part. ========================================================================= Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally, Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of 1010 E. 59th Street Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter. Chicago, IL 60637

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Sai Emrys <saizai@...>