I’ll start with an image from Peter Galazka, passed on by Tim Evanson on Google+, involving who vs. whom and (in)formal style, and then move to Geoff Pullum on “Normal and Formal” on the Lingua Franca blog, also on who vs. whom.
Archive for the ‘Pronoun case’ Category
The power of lore and dogma
May 25, 2012Pronoun case double-header
May 23, 2012In an interview with Xerox CEO Ursula Burns on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning (“If You Don’t Transform, You’re Stuck”), two pronoun case finds: an accusative whom “by position” and a nominative conjoined object I.
That’s WH!
May 20, 2012Today’s Zippy:
Entertaining though the comments on fashion are, my interest here is in the sequence:
Q: Who wears high fashion?
A: Dingburgers..that’s who!
with an ellipsis in the answer that’s a special case of the Sluicing construction discussed in my “Siren song” posting.
Nominative intensified objects
May 17, 2012From Rodney Huddleston, a nominative usage he hadn’t seen before (and neither had I):
Arabella had a habit of overstating things, one that she had so much internalised that it was not always easy for she herself to tell when she was mildly pleased about something and when she was genuinely delighted. (John Lanchester, Capital: 70)
A nominative intensified object, from a writer who surely would not have used an nominative without the intensive reflexive:
*it was not always easy for she to tell …
What might have led Lanchester to a nominative intensified object?
like you and I
May 16, 2012Caught this morning on public radio station KALW, during its beg-a-thon:
… because listeners like you and I agree that …
It’s the nominative case of I that’s the issue, and the example illustrates two different points of usage:
(a) pronoun case in combinations with like (and as, beside(s), including, and than); and
(b) pronoun case in coordination.
Collecting examples of people like you and I — there’s a huge number of them — then led me to blogger Melanie Spiller, puzzling over such examples in 2006 and concluding (via tortured grammatical reasoning) that I was the correct pronoun form.
Another informal WH construction
May 14, 2012In the spirit of my posting on to-infinitival interrogatives, or ToInt, which also mentioned Sluicing and WH echo / reclamatory questions, I offer yet another informal WH construction — which, like these others, is awkward with the formal pronoun whom (rather than neutral who) in object function. This is the exclamatory interrogative construction (or ExclInt) in
Where they went! What they did! (It’s just amazing!)
Quant of whom
May 12, 2012In my last posting on who/whom, I pointed out that whom is awkward at best when it occurs in constructions that are informal in style — because the choice of whom rather than who is formal in style (Formal vs. Normal, as Geoff Pullum put it in a Lingua Franca posting back in January). In that posting, I noted the interaction between the choice of case for the pronoun WHO and the choice between fronted and stranded Ps:
(1) To whom did you give the book? [fronted P + whom]
(2) Whom did you give the book to? [stranded P + whom]
(3) Who did you give the book to? [stranded P + who]
Who is unacceptable in standard English in the construction in (1), in which WHO is the object in a PP.
Now, in most cases, examples like (1) have a double dose of formality, since both P-fronting and whom are associated with formal style; examples like (2) are merely formal (since P-stranding is neutral in style); and examples like (3) are neutral in style (“normal”). But there are cases in which stranding P is unavailable, so that (1) is the only acceptable alternative, and (as you might expect) whom no longer seems so markedly formal
Idiolect or style level?
May 4, 2012Recent mail from Rodney Huddleston quotes me on pronoun case:
Note again the contrast between WHO and the ordinary personal pronouns. For the ordinary personal pronouns, Form1 [the ‘nominative’] has, for many speakers, come to be seen as formal, serious, and emphatic — a development that leads some of these speakers to prefer “between you and I” and the like in serious contexts. (link)
and asks:
Is it the case that people use this coordinate nominative in ‘serious’ or formal contexts. My impression is that people who use it do so irrespective of the formality of the context. It’s not, I think, that they say ‘They invited Sue and I’ in formal contexts but ‘They invited Sue and me’ in informal contexts. My feeling is that it is a matter of idiolect rather than style level. Do you know if there has been any empirical study on this issue?
Who(m) to V
April 18, 2012From a Comcast (cable tv) program description:
(Airdate January 9, 2007) Stabler and Benson are at odds over whom to believe in a “he said, she said” rape case involving a husband and wife (Blair Underwood, Michael Michele) in the middle of an extremely bitter child-custody dispute.
I was struck by the whom of whom to believe. Not unacceptable, but very much not what I would say or write.
Meanwhile, Stan Carey has posted about a kerfluffle on Twitter, in which various tweeters have objected strongly to the name of the Twitter feature Who to follow. Carey finds this variant entirely acceptable (and the whom variant stilted), as do I. But Business Insider thinks it’s “bad English”; GalleyCat calls it “one of the most viewed and easily overlooked grammar mistakes on the Internet”, adding that it’s “reassuring to watch a major social network struggle” with grammatical rules; Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at NYU, believes it’s a “grammatical error”; and other Twitter users are variously bothered, disappointed, or annoyed by the phrase. Carey provides lots of quotes, with links.
He maintains that all the critics are wrong and provides a long and detailed account of the who/whom issue, with many citations of sources. Well worth reading.
Here my concern is with the choice of pronouns in the specific construction in the Comcast and Twitter examples.
The perils of advice
March 23, 2012Blogger Brian Risk puzzled on 11/23/09 about pronoun case with including:
When you determine if you are to use “me” or “I” isn’t it the rule that you are supposed to ignore the words relating to other people? For example “John and me went swimming” is wrong because “me went swimming” isn’t how ya say it.
Here I am now really confused when it comes to sentences that have “everyone including”. To illustrate: “Everyone including me went to the show” is the way I’ve been saying it my whole life, but it just dawned on me how asinine it would be to say just “me went to the show.” However, “everyone including I went to the show” sounds equally asinine, but can this be right?
Risk has dimly remembered some (rather confused) advice about the case of conjoined pronouns and then extended that to examples with the preposition including (instead of the conjunction and); since it’s I went to the show and not me went to the show, he concludes that it should be everyone including I went to the show, despite the fact that this runs counter to his intuitions and his actual practice. Garbled theory trumps facts.
It appears that many others have gone down this path to everyone including I.