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

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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