On Sun, 17 Jul 2005 16:25:40 GMT, Bob Cunningham
<exw6sxq@earthlink.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 17 Jul 2005 09:16:32 +0100, Chris Croughton
> <chris@keristor.net> said:
>
>> I happened to hear an American pops ong recently which contained a usage
>> which seemed strange to me:
>
>> "I do love you much."
>
>> In British English that is wrong. Is it acceptable American, or a
>> dialect form, or a slang usage?
>
> "I love you much" is not something the ordinary American
> would be expected to say, although "I don't love you much"
> is unexceptionable.
Same in Britain. OK, thanks.
> I wouldn't call "I love you much" wrong, though. I think
> it's grammatically okay, and its meaning is clear. "I love
> you lots" is an exact parallel to it while being more
> natural for a native American speaker to say.
I thought of that, which was why the deprecation of "love you much"
seemed strange. But it's not the only inconsistency:
"The dog pleases me."
"The dog likes me."
(In the first the object, 'me', is the one experiencing the emotion, in
the second the subject, 'the dog', is the one experiencing it. And
people wonder why foreigners have problems <g>...)
Chris C
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