Case nuances
case
My
sophomore
seminar students have weekly assignments to collect real-life
examples relevant to some point of usage in English and to discuss their
significance. Some of these examples are surprising and
thought-provoking. Here are three from the last (both most recent
and final) assignment, on pronoun case, illustrating nuances in the choice between nominative and accusative case.
First, what looks like a simple example of non-standard accusative case
in a coordinate subject:
(1) Me and Paco are best friends.
Ah, but things shift when I tell you that Paco is a chihuahua.
Suddenly, (1) doesn't sound so bad any more, and its standard version --
(2) Paco and I are best friends.
no longer sounds so good; (2) humanizes Paco, inappropriately to my
mind. (Serious dog-lovers might feel otherwise.) And to the
minds of others I've consulted.
Faced with the choice between (1) and (2) in a moderately formal
setting, I'd reject them both and go for something like
Paco's my best friend.
Second, an example of non-standard nominative case in a coordinate
object:
(3) Rachel wants you and I to...
Google turns up over 500 examples of "wants you and I to" (many of them
in religious material, for some reason), and over 700 for "want you and
I to":
The Star wants you and I to register to
access stories on the site.
www.polspy.ca/items/2004/08/20/736.php
He wants you and I to be evangelists, to help others to go to Heaven,
with our word and our deeds, with our life!
biblia.com/jesusbible/isaiah7.htm
Now, many people who reject things like
(4) Rachel likes you and I.
find examples like (3) considerably better -- not fully acceptable, but
considerably better. I share this judgment.
The effect seems to have something to do the fact that the coordinate
NP is interpreted as the subject of the VP that follows it. It
also seems to be specific to the verb
want;
hits for other verbs are less than 10% of those for
want: raw hit numbers of 48 for
"expects", 34 for "forces", 33 for "needs", 12 for "tells", 10 for
"asks", and 0 for "likes". (These are almost all religious in
content.) In any case, the phenomenon deserves some further
exploration.
Third, accusative
us (rather
than
we) as a determiner in a
subject NP:
(5) All us old folk are going to bed now.
The usual examples of personal pronouns as determiners are things like
(6) We/Us old folk are going to bed now.
in which
we is labeled as the
norm, with "very colloquial and dialectal varieties having accusative
us" (
Cambridge Grammar of the English Language,
p. 459). My own judgments are that
we in (6) is hyper-formal, while
us is decidedly informal, so that
neither variant is comfortable for me in most formal contexts. In
(5), on the other hand,
we
strikes me (and a fair number of others) as simply unacceptable:
(7) ??All we old folk are going to bed now.
The subject NPs in (5) and (7) have an instance of "predeterminer"
all -- a use of
all in which it combines with a
full NP (that is definite and plural), in which use it alternates with
a construction having an explicit partitive in
of. The explicit partitive
has accusative objects of
of,
of course:
(8) All of us/*we old folk are going to bed
soon.
My hypothesis is that the contrast between (5) and (7) reflects the
contrast within (8). (For what it's worth, the contrast between
(5) and (7) is even starker for me when the predeterminer is
both rather than
all.)
And that's the top of the crop for this week.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at May 29, 2005 02:44 PM