Word.ws English Dictionary

personal datives

personal datives is the plural of personal dative.

Meaning of personal dative

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

Questions about personal datives

What is personal datives the plural of?
Personal datives is the plural of personal dative.

Words near personal datives in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: personal datives (page history and authors); 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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