Personal datives are grammatical constructions in which a pronoun appearing directly after the main verb in a clause refers to the same entity as the subject, as in the following:

1.a. I got me a new turntable.
1.b. You're going to get you an A in this class.

While some speakers of English would find it acceptable to use reflexive pronouns such as myself or yourself rather than me and you, respectively, in 1.a. and 1.b., for many speakers, the use of the second pronoun in these sentences is simply redundant. For them, the sentences in 2 would be more frequently used to convey basically the same meaning as those in 1:

2.a. I got a new turntable.
2.b. You're going to get an A in this class.

Use of personal datives is often associated with Southern American and Appalachian English (Wolfram & Christian 1976; Christian 1991; Webelhuth, & Dannenberg 2006). However, Launspach and Graham (2004) and Launspach (2012) observed use of personal datives in audio recordings of Idahoans interviewed between 1968 and 1991, maintaining that the use of the construction was primarily a reflection of settlement patterns. Antieau (2012) observed use of personal datives in interviews collected in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming as part of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (LAMR) and described their use as part of a larger pattern of syntactic doubling that surfaces in various ways in the collection. Horn (2008) described the use of the personal dative construction in pop culture, including lyrics.

Here, I'd like to return to the issue of the personal dative in LAMR and look more closely at some of the linguistic and social characteristics of its use in the corpus. This map shows the areal distribution of all LAMR speakers (in red) and the distribution of speakers who used personal datives in their interview for the project (in teal):

While the map reveals that personal datives were used by relatively few people in LAMR (10 out of 70 total informants), it should be noted that this data was not directly elicited from informants, but was simply collateral data that emerged during LAMR interviews. The 10 speakers represent 10 different communities: In Colorado, these communities are Black Hawk, Gunnison, Hygiene, Lamar, Springfield, and Walden; in Utah, Santaquin; and in Wyoming, Alva, Douglas, and Rock River.

So what does the personal dative data look like in LAMR? Here are some examples:

 3.a. "I’d get me another a new pair…" (Black Hawk, CO)
 3.b. "…my dad got him a Chesapeake." (Gunnison, CO)
 3.c. "…while I get me some shrimp." (Hygiene, CO)
 3.d. "…we fixed us one of these army cots." (Lamar, CO)
 3.e. "…and we took and got us a big, big…" (Springfield, CO)
 3.f. "...I got me a little, I don’t know, a third horse motor…" (Springfield, CO)
 3.g. "Some rancher that got him a wife." (Walden, CO)
 3.h. "I bought me this box of Cracker Jacks." (Santaquin, UT)
 3.i. "…and then he finally built him a, a home." (Santaquin, UT)
 3.j. "We'd get us a prune or something." (Alva, WY)
 3.k. "…you'd have you a snack in there…" (Douglas, WY)
 3.l. "…you'd build you a little sagebrush fire…" (Douglas, WY)

As you can see, much of the shared subject/dative objects tend to be of the I/me or you/you variety, although there are some cases in which the subject is not represented by a pronoun (as in my dad in b, and some rancher in g).    

A few non-canonical cases are found as imperatives, where the subject (you) is implied, unless a personal name is used (as in c).

4.a. "Go get you a drink whenever you want it." (Hygiene, CO)   
4.b "…go get you a drink of water or something…" (Springfield, CO)
4.c. "Lottie, go in there in that box and find you a pair of overshoes." (Rock River, WY)

Furthermore, the example in c shows that the subject and dative pronoun can operate at some distance from one another. As a final note on language structure with regard to personal datives, the related construction, the so-called dative presentative, as in "Here's you a piece of pizza!" (Wood, Horn, Zanuttini, & Lindemann 2015), does not show up in LAMR.

From a social perspective, with 5 out of 36 females and 5 out of 34 males using personal datives, it is perhaps only out of a sense of duty to report on the ever-so-slightly higher percentage of LAMR men than women using the construction (rounded off to 15% vs. 14%, respectively), but this difference is somewhat buoyed by a tendency for those men to use personal datives more in the interviews than the women did (with males using 13 personal datives in LAMR and females 9). In terms of education, 2 out of 20 (10%) speakers in LAMR who had attended college used personal datives, 3 out of 25 high school graduates (12%) used them, and 5 out of the 21 informants who didn't finish high school (24%) used them.* Thus, there is a tendency for personal dative users in LAMR to have not finished high school, which is not surprising given the status of the personal dative as a nonstandard construction; however, of the 22 total uses of personal datives, 11 were by high school graduates (50%) and 9 by those who didn't finish high school (41%), making the performance of the middle education group actually higher than that of the lowest group. Still, with only two uses of personal datives, college attendees tended to not employ the construction, at least during the course of their interviews. 

Returning to the figure above, the areal distribution of personal dative users in LAMR provides perhaps the clearest pattern in its usage. Although obviously surrounded by other informants in the subregion who didn't employ personal datives in their interviews, the construction certainly seems to pattern east of the Front Range, in the Great Plains region of both Colorado and Wyoming (with, of course as these things go, an obvious outlier in Santaquin, Utah, and a more subtle one just west of Ft. Collins, Colorado). In doing so, the pattern draws to mind the words of the late Lee Pederson from his exhaustive article on American dialects, when he said that "Culturally, the trails from Texas into Colorado and Wyoming carried the language and artifacts through the area" (2001:284). Could the use of the personal dative be one such linguistic artifact?

In future studies (and blog posts), I will continue looking at features and clusters of features in LAMR as well as other sources to see what kind of support we can find for Pederson's linguistic pathways from Texas to Wyoming. Before doing so, however, I need to take me a break from this computer for awhile.

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*The education level of four LAMR informants was not recorded.

References

Antieau, Lamont. (2012). "Seeing double: Syntactic doubling in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies." Guest lecture presented at the University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS, February 9, 2012.

Christian, Donna. (1991). "The personal dative in Appalachian English." In Peter Trudgill and J.K. Chambers (eds.), Dialects of English (pp. 11–19). London: Longman.

Horn, Laurence R. (2008). "'I love me some him': The landscape of non-argument datives." In Olivier Bonami and Patricia Cabredo Hofherr (eds.), Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 7.

Launspach, Sonja. (2012). "The journey to Idaho: The use of oral history tapes and census data to trace the history of regional dialect features." Idaho Yesterdays 53.

Launspach, Sonja, and Janna Graham. (2004). "'Go west, and get you another homestead": The expatriate personal dative in Idaho.'" Paper presented at the American Dialect Society session, Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association annual meeting, Boulder, CO. October 1, 2004.

Pederson, Lee. (2001). “Dialects.” In The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume VI: English in North America, edited by John Algeo, 253-90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Webelhuth, Gert, and Clare J. Dannenberg. (2006). "Southern American English personal datives: The theoretical significance of dialectal variation." American Speech 81:31-55.

Wolfram, Walt, and Donna Christian. (1976). Appalachian Speech. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics.

Wood, Jim, Laurence R. Horn, Raffaella Zanuttini, and Luke Lindemann. (2015). "The Southern dative presentative meets Mechanical Turk." American Speech 90:291–320.