“I love me some him”: The landscape of non-argument datives

A familiar syntactic feature of dialectal (Southern and Appalachian) U.S. English is the optional occurrence of a nonsubcategorized “personal dative” pronominal in transitive clauses which obligatorily coindexes the subject but whose semantic contribution is ill-understood. As we shall see, this personal dative (PD) bears suggestive if not always straightforward relations to constructions in such languages as French, German, Walbiri, Hebrew, and Old English involving what have been variously termed “ethical”, “free”, “non-lexical”, or “affected” datives. Some of these datives are coreferential with the subject (e.g. Je me prends un petit café, lit. "I take me a little coffee") while others are non-coreferential (e.g. Ils lui ont tué son oiseau, lit. " They killed himhis bird"); they typically invite benefactive andmalefactive (adversative) understandings respectively. We begin, however, with the English personal dative, as described in the literature (cf. e.g. Green 1974: 190ff., Christian 1991, Sroda & Mishoe 1995, Webelhuth & Dannenberg 2006) and displayed in a range of traditional country and mountain ballads and their modern descendants [boldface used here to indicate coreference, not contrast/focus]: