Archive for the ‘Pronoun case’ Category

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Annals of NomConjObj: Miss Adelaide

August 24, 2017

Yesterday from Ben Zimmer, e-mail saying that he’d recently seen a performance of the musical “Guys and Dolls” and thought I’d appreciate an exchange in the song “Marry the Man Today” (one of the songs that was cut for the movie adaptation), a duet for the characters Adelaide (Miss Adelaide of the Hot Box girls) and Sarah (Sister Sarah Brown in a Salvation Army band):

Adelaide: At Wanamaker’s and Saks and Klein’s
A lesson I’ve been taught
You can’t get alterations on a dress you haven’t bought.
Sarah: At any vegetable market from Borneo to Nome
You mustn’t squeeze a melon till you get the melon home.
Adelaide: You’ve simply got to gamble.
Sarah: You get no guarantee.
Adelaide: Now doesn’t that kind of apply to you and I?
Sarah: You and me.

(referring to Adelaide and Nathan Detroit, who runs a crap game; and Sarah and Sky Masterson, a high-rolling gambler)

You can listen to the song, in the original cast album, here.

A NomConjObj (nominative conjoined object) from Adelaide, corrected by Sarah. The first instance of NomConjObj in my life that I actually noticed — surely not the first that came past me, but the first I was conscious of, and tried to locate in its social world (working-class NYC low-lifes, in the show) — also part of my first experience of a live performance of a musical, in the original Broadway production, which opened in 1950. I was 10, and it was stunning.

(#1) Playbill from the original production

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Posted in Coordination, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Pronoun case, Syntax, Theater, Usage | 3 Comments »

Three from xkcd

December 13, 2016

Three recent xkcd cartoons: #1767 “US State Names” (goofy play on the names of the states), #1770 “UI Change” (on arbitrary and unannounced changes in user interfaces … and on aging), and #1771 “It Was I” (on pronoun case).

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Posted in Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Pronoun case | Leave a Comment »

Helping the kid out

December 2, 2016

From the most recent  NYT “Metropolitan Diary” (on-line on the 26th, in the national edition on the 28th), a contribution from Michael Joseloff that begins:

Two teenagers with clipboards were stopping passers-by on the Upper East Side. I was in a hurry to get to the bank, so I tried to maneuver past them and avoid their pitch. No luck.

“Me and my friend are trying to raise money to buy uniforms for our basketball team,” one of the boys began, before rattling on with the rest of his memorized speech. To paraphrase Renée Zellweger in “Jerry Maguire,” he had me at “me and my friend.” He seemed sincere. I decided to help.

I was desperately hoping that he was going to help the kid by making a contribution. But no: he proposed to help by correcting the kid’s grammar.

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Posted in Conversation, Peeving, Pronoun case, Relevance, Usage attitudes, Words and things | 1 Comment »

Pronoun case in the Thames Valley CID

July 27, 2016

From S4 E4 (“Masonic Mysteries”) of the ITV detective procedural tv show Inspector Morse, an exchange between Morse and his sergeant, Lewis:

(1) Morse: It’s me he wants, it’s me he’s going to get, or rather, it’s me that’s going to get him…

(2) Lewis: Shouldn’t that be: “It’s I who am going to get him”?

It’s all about pronoun case (Acc me vs. Nom I) in it-clefts: roughly, identifying clauses with

subject it, a main verb BE, a predicative NP, and a relative clause missing an NP (the relative clause can have relativizer ∅, that, or a WH-pronoun like who)

— in these instances, clauses supplying the answer to the questions “Who does he want? Who is he going to get? Who’s going to get him?”

And, this being Britain, it’s also all about social class.

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Posted in Language and society, Movies and tv, Pronoun case, Variation | 1 Comment »

A medal for pronoun case

July 15, 2016

In today’s Stanford News, a report by Dayo Mitchell, “The projects conducted by the winners of the 2016 Firestone and Golden medals and the Kennedy Prize represent the breadth of the undergraduate experience at Stanford. They included research on germ cell, federal farm animal policy, the tailoring industry in Naples, ethics and autonomous vehicles, and the writings of author Zadie Smith.”

Thirty-five graduating seniors were recognized recently for their outstanding thesis projects. They are recipients of the 2016 Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research, the Robert M. Golden Medal for Excellence in Humanities and Creative Arts; and the David M. Kennedy Honors Thesis Prize.

The prizewinners represent 24 academic departments and all three schools with undergraduate programs

Among the eight Goldens was

Tyler Lemon, “An Examination of the Distribution and Variation of Non-Coordinated Pronoun Case Forms in English,” linguistics, advised by Tom Wasow (linguistics).

(I helped out).

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Posted in Pronoun case, Stanford, Syntax | Leave a Comment »

Case choice by rhyme; non-standard case systems

April 12, 2016

This is a re-play (edited) of an exchange on ADS-L, back in 2005, about two subtopics in choosing case forms of pronouns in English. The thread was not posted about in Language Log at the time, but now some of these issues have arisen afresh on Facebook in recent days. I’m not sure if I can wrestle the current discussion into some sort of coherent shape, but I can at least revive a bit of the older conversation.

I started the thread on 8/11/05, under the heading “Case choice by rhyme”, and then on from there.

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Posted in Pronoun case | 5 Comments »

A new Page, on I vs. me etc.

February 27, 2016

Created yesterday, a Page on this blog (under “Linguistics notes”) devoted to pronoun case in English, created originally for the use of Tyler Lemon, who’s working on a Stanford undergraduate honors thesis in linguistics on the topic, but now made availabe to everyone interested.

The page inventories postings (mostly on this blog, but some on Language Log, and a few elsewhere) on the choice between Nom and Acc in English, including who vs. whom, the case of conjoined objects, especially in the NomConjObj (Nom Conjoined Objects, like between you and I) construction, the case of subjects in embedded clauses (Acc case in ISOC — In-situ Subject of Clause — and ESOC — Extracted Subject of Clause), the case of pronouns in combination with preceding items like as, beside(s), but, including, like, than, case in inversion constructions (Along came me), case in predicatives (It is I/he/*they, It’s me/*I, That’s me/*I in the photo), case in fragment constructions (for example, short answers to questions: Who’s there? Me/*I), case in formulas (Woe is me, Till death do us part), Nom he (He ‘God’, generic he) as object of preposition, case in appositives (we/us Americans), case choice and style/register, case choice influenced by the exigencies of rhyme (Oh where oh where has my little dog gone? / Oh where oh where can he be? / They make them [sausages] of dog they make them of horse, / I think they make them of he), case choice in nonstandard dialects, and more. Possessives (Poss my etc.) and reflexives (Refl myself etc.) are clearly related but this imventory touches on them only tangentially.

Posted in Links, Pronoun case, Resources | Leave a Comment »

On the who/whom front, and AZ terminology

November 4, 2015

Caught in  the NYT Book Review feature “By the Book” on Sunday (November 1st), in an interview with Gloria Steinem, three questions from the interviewer, questions with Acc whom beginning a WH, or constituent, question:

(1) Whom do you consider to be the best contemporary feminist writers?

(2) Whom do you consider the most underrated or unappreciated writers, past and present?

(3) Whom would you want to write your life story?

The WH element in all three questions is “extracted” from a position that requires an Acc —

(1′) You consider  him / *he  to be the best contemporary feminist writers.

(2′) You consider  him / *he  the most underrated or unappreciated writers, past and present.

(3′) You want  him / *he  to write your life story.

and so Acc whom is prescriptively correct. My own usage has who in all three of these examples; I found the interviewer’s whoms to be stiff, over-formal (even prissy), and old-fashioned — but that’s a matter of taste.

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Posted in Pronoun case, Terminology | Leave a Comment »

A sad editing moment at the New York Times

September 12, 2015

In last Sunday’s NYT Magazine, I was saddened, and not a little outraged, to read, in Dan Kois’s piece “The Misanthropic Genius of Joy Williams”, the following bit of garbled English:

In the end the essay is a call to arms for a new kind of literature, one Williams sounds doubtful that anyone, including she, can write.

(After nearly a week, the sentence is still on the paper’s site. Apparently nobody thought there was anything wrong with it.)

Now, I’m familiar with examples like this, and have posted about them, but not from professional writers or editors who are presumably native speakers of English; instead, they come from amateurs who are so unwilling to trust their instincts about how their language works that they cast about for guidance from (poorly remembered) advice on how to write their language that they’ve been taught. They have some excuse. But Kois and whatever editors worked on this piece do not.

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Posted in Pronoun case, Usage advice | Leave a Comment »

Conjunction or preposition?

May 21, 2015

In the NYT yesterday, p. 19, in “Happy Rockefeller, 88, Whose Marriage to Governor Scandalized Voters, Dies” by Robert D. McFadden:

many Americans were shocked when Margaretta Fitler Murphy, called Happy, and Mr. Rockefeller, who was nearly 18 years older than she, married on May 4, 1963.

The point is than she, with a nominative pronoun in construction with than — where many people (I am one) would have used the accusative her. There’s a long-standing issue in usage here, which I’ve posted about on this blog (as “Dinosaur grammar”), in connection with a Dinosaur Comics.

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Posted in Pronoun case, Syntactic categories, Variation | Leave a Comment »

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