"Bring me a pen"
"Do me a favor"
"Get me a piece of paper"
What kind of sentences are these?
Why do these sentences not have 'for' before 'me'.
Many thanks before hand.
You can (although most people wouldn't) say 'Get for me a piece of paper'; what
is idiomatic is 'While you're shopping, would you get some Air Mail paper
for me?' (Probably a bad example; since the coming of e-mail I guess there's a generation out there who don't know what 'Air Mail paper'
is; you can substitute whatever noun suits your needs!)
In Old English (a thousand years ago) many words were declined - they had endings that signalled what they were doing in a sentence; for example, the preposition 'for' had to be followed by a dative ending. This doesn't happen any more, but a few fossils have kept traces of this grammatical form; for example, the word 'nonce' is derived from 'for the
n one
s'.
So the current grammar of English treats 'for' as Mehrgan explained; the history behind it is that there was once a dative form of 'me'; so often there are two (or more) ways of dealing with 'for me'. (But if etymology doesn't 'float you boat' [=roughly 'entertain you'] you can forget all about the dative. ;-)
b