Following up on last week's posts on the personal dative construction (e.g. "I drank me a large coffee") in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (LAMR) and in pop music, this week I take a look at the same construction in a Stratified Random Sample of Twitter from 2013 (about 10% of the year's Twitter activity, or approximately 30 million tweets). Because of the size of the dataset, I used a more refined set of keywords than I did on LAMR and the lyrics collection:

• I within 2 of me followed by a, some, or sum
• we within 2 of us followed by a, some, or sum
• you within 2 of you followed by a, some, or sum

Besides sum, variant spellings, such as u for you, were not represented in the keyword search. Furthermore, I did not search for personal dative (PD) constructions consisting of the third-person pronouns during this round of analysis, given the difficulties in determining whether third-person pronouns immediately following verbs referred to the same entity as the subject or another party altogether. The search was also confined to sentences with the nominative pronouns I, we, or you, rather than full noun phrases (e.g. "the student"), in subject position.

The results show that, by far, PDs on Twitter were in first-person singular. The most frequent verbs found in first-person singular PDs were:

1. love (292 times with some, as in "I love me some chuck taylors"; 54 times with a, as in "I love me a bit of holiday planning);
2. need (165 times with a, as in "I need me a lobster roll"; 48 times with some, as in "I need me some twitter friends");
3. got (55 times with a, as in "I got me a pineapple soda"; 20 times with some, as in "I got me some oreos");
4. want (50 times with a, as in "I want me a girlfriend"; 25 times with some, as in "I want me some waffles").

Thus, love patterns differently than the other verbs in this list in its strong tendency to co-occur with some rather than a. Other verbs that had some currency in first-person PDs in the dataset included bought, brought, find, found, get, got, had, like, made, needs, and take. Many of the verbs appearing in these PDs were also represented by variant spellings, love being especially salient in this regard -- loooooove, loooove, loveeeeeee, luh, luhh, luv -- with some of its spellings apparently serving to intensify, as in "I loooooooooove me some beyonce" and "i loveeeeeeee me some youuu."

For the third-person plural, we appears with several verbs, the most frequent being got in "we got us a" and love, as in "we love us some." For the second person, the most common verb is get, which appears several times in variations of "why don't you get you some money?"

Although more work should be done on the distributions of verbs in PDs in terms of their variant spellings as well as PDs with full noun phrases as subjects, this analysis could provide a strong foundation for future study of the use of PDs in social media.