Word.ws English Dictionary

personal dative

personal dative noun: a grammatical construction emphasizing subject involvement, associated with Southern American English, consisting of a pronoun that occurs immediately after a verb and is coreferential with the subject.

Noun

personal dative (plural personal datives)

  1. A grammatical construction emphasizing subject involvement, associated with Southern American English, consisting of a pronoun that occurs immediately after a verb and is coreferential with the subject.
    • There are certain general observations which can be made about this construction, which will be referred to here as the “personal dative,” although its exact distribution is somewhat difficult to pin down. […] Personal datives are restricted to animate referents.1976 June, Waft Wolfram, Donna Christian, Appalachian Speech, Arlington, Va.: Center for Applied Linguistics, →ISBN, →LCCN, page 122

Forms of personal dative

pluralpersonal datives

Questions about personal dative

What does personal dative mean?
Personal dative means a grammatical construction emphasizing subject involvement, associated with Southern American English, consisting of a pronoun that occurs immediately after a verb and is coreferential with the subject.
What part of speech is personal dative?
Personal dative is a noun.
What is the plural of personal dative?
The plural of personal dative is personal datives.

Words near personal dative in the dictionary

  1. personal conduct
  2. personal covenant
  3. personal covenants
  4. personal crises
  5. personal crisis
  6. personal dative
  7. personal datives
  8. personal day
  9. personal days
  10. personal defence weapon
  11. personal defence weapons

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: personal dative (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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