"I got me a fiddle": Personal datives in pop music (1951-2014)
Following up on yesterday's post, today I look at the personal dative (PD) construction in a collection of lyrics from songs in Billboard's year-end Top Ten (1951-2014). The analysis relies on data culled from the collection using as keywords personal pronouns in nominative form within three words of the same pronouns in accusative/dative form, thus ignoring for now, those PDs with noun phrases, rather than pronouns, in subject position, as well as PDs in which subjects and dative objects are separated by many words. Additionally, the definition used for PDs for the purposes of this analysis adhered to the criteria proposed by Horn (2008: 172-3), which means that constructions such as lay me down (found in both Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge over Troubled Water" from 1970 and Mariah Carey's "One Sweet Day" from 1996) were ignored here, due to being classified as intransitive constructions rather than as PDs.
The search of the Billboard material revealed several songs that included personal datives. These included the following lines:
- "Someday I'll find me a woman"
- "I just did me some talking to the sun"
- "I never knew me a better time"
- "I got me a fine wife, I got me a fiddle"
- "And I'ma get me a shot before the end of the night"
The songs are as follows (in chronological order):
The Impressions, featuring a young Curtis Mayfield, perform their hit, "It's All Right," which appeared at #10 on Billboard's year-end Top 100 for 1963.
B.J. Thomas performs "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" in 1970 on Top of the Pops. Written by Hal David and Burt Bacharach, the song appeared at #4 on Billboard's year-end Top 100 chart for 1970.
Elton John's "Crocodile Rock," which ended at #7 on Billboard's year-end Top 100 list for 1973
John Denver's "Thank God I'm a Country Boy," which appeared at #10 on Billboard's year-end Top 100 for 1975
NSFW
Akon performs "I Wanna Love You," which appeared at #8 on the Billboard year-end Top 100 charts for 2007 and features Snoop Dogg
This is a topic that I will be sure to return to as my Billboard corpus expands and I make the time to run a more sophisticated search for PDs in the collection. In the next few days, I will also look at the use of PDs in Twitter.
Reference
Horn, Laurence R. (2008). "'I love me some him': The landscape of non-argument datives." In O. Bonami & P. Cabredo Hofherr (eds.), Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 7: 169-192.