"Give me it!"
I was at the beach today (St Andrews had an absolutely spectacular September this year), and I heard a young boy scream to his brother as they threw around a disk toy, “give me it!”. This construction immediately struck me as odd. It is, of course, correct, insofar as I (and more importantly, his brother) understood him clearly: he wanted his brother to pass the toy to him. But the construction “give me it” nevertheless made my ears perk up. Let’s take a look.
Style directs our choice among alternative equivalent phrasings; grammar tells us which alternatives are equvalent and permissable. Let us consider the possibilites:
| Give me it.? | Give to me it.* | Give me the toy. | ^*Give to me the toy.* |
| Give it me.* | Give it to me. | Give the toy me.* | Give the toy to me. |
In accordance with common practice, small asterisks (*) mark sentences that are obviously unacceptable. The unmarked sentences are valid, and the small question marks (?) indicate the specimen sentence. This table really ought to be in three dimensions: picture, if you will, the right two columns stacked on top of the left two columns. I can find three possible transformations, for a total of 8 forms. First, the word “me” might or might not be preceded by the preposition “to”; second, the pronoun “it” might be replaced by its (inferred) referent “the toy”; and third, the order of the arguments can be swapped: “me” might precede or follow “it”/“the toy”.
Let us begin by giving names to sentence parts. The first word in all of these sentences is “give”, which in this situation is acting as an imperative verb: the boy was telling his brother to do something. The words after the verb, the nouns “me” and “it”/“the toy”, I will call the verb’s “arguments”. These arguments can be distinguished by their semantic and syntactic roles. The first role is the agent of the verb, who is sometimes but not always the verb’s subject. In this case, the agent is the person at whom the utterance is directed; the sentence lacks an explicit grammatical subject(compare: “you give me the toy”, in which the subject and agent is “you”). The patient of the verb, the thing to which the action of the verb is done, is “it” or “the toy”. The recipient is “me” or “to me”.
It seems as though the rule is this: when the recipient does not have a preposition, it must come directly after the verb. Otherwise, the patient follows the verb. In the case of verbs with only a patient, the patient comes directly after the verb and is called the “direct object”: compare “eat it”, “kiss her”, “see them”. When there is a recipient and no patient, then the recipient comes right after the verb, but it sometimes takes a preposition: “tell me”, but “talk to me”. “Tell to me”* and “talk me”* are both forbidden.
In our sample, the pattern seems to be that the recipient takes a preposition only when it follows the patient; otherwise, netiher argument has a preposition. Thus: “give me…” and “give…to me” are equivalent. The oddness comes when the patient is replaced with a pronoun. “Give it to me” and “give me the toy” are perfectly acceptable, and “give to me it”* and “give the toy me”* are completely unacceptable. Even so, “give me it” sounds odd. It fits, however, with the pattern, and it (and its twin “give it me”*, which is awkward because the recipient lacks a preposition) has the advantage of being only three syllables, rather than four or five like the alternatives. When a young boy is calling out to his brother on the beach, he wants to use as few syllables as possible, but he still follows a stable pattern in his speech.
