Wilson Gray on ADS-L 1/21/12, quoting from “an anti-SOPA rant”:
(1) The US government is deciding that THEY can decide what me (as a Canadian not subject to American law) can do.
Wilson found this me as subject bizarre, but I noted that subject me is moderately common, under certain circumstances.
Subject whom(ever) has been the topic of many postings on Language Log and this blog (an inventory of postings on who/whom, through 11/15/09, is available here). Occurrences of whom in subject position can be motivated by sentence syntax — in the configurations I’ve called ISOC and ESOC (see here and here) — or can be unmotivated by syntactic context, in what I’ll call unprovoked occurrences.
From Ben Zimmer a few days ago, via Nancy Friedman on Twitter, a remarkably contemptuous response to a customer complaint from an Australian fashion chain — with a burst of unprovoked subject whom in it, in combination with some unsureness about the difference between restrictive and non-restrictive relatives, beginning with
the customer whom is acclimatised to buying from “clothing for the masses” type retailers, is almost frightened by our range
I have it on display in my living room, but apparently I didn’t post it: William Haefeli’s New Yorker cartoon of 8/30/10 on between you and I:
(Most recent NomConjObj posting here; most informative one here.) As I’ve noted before, (just) between you and I has become a fixed expression for many people, including some who otherwise use NomConjObjs very sparingly.
Recently collected instances of NomConjObjs (nominative conjoined objects — see the brief summary of the topic, bibliography, and list of blog postings here):
(1) Seer: Don’t be naive. I told you of my vision. Of you and I doing great things together. [episode of the tv show Charmed] (link)
(2) “I think it raises, at a very bottom line, real serious questions about government interfering with the ability of you and I to talk to each other,” Policinski [Gene Policinski, executive director of the First Amendment Center] says. “How far does that go? How far will the courts permit it?” [about Twitter blocking on BART in San Francisco] (link)
Add to these:
(3) You’re getting everything that you’ve heard Norm and I talk about… (Greg Sherwood, in KQED begathon, 5/22/06)
(4) Michele Obama: “I think it was important for Jill and I to come now because we’re at the point where the relief efforts are underway but the attention of the world starts to wane a bit. And as we enter the rainy season and the hurricane season, you know, the issues are just going to become more compounded. And I think it was important for us to come and shed a light.” (link) [e-mail from Ben Zimmer 4/14/10 under header “FLOTUS NomConjObj”)
(5) “My poor friend,” she [Sonia Sotomayor] recalled years later in a speech honoring Mr. Cabranes, “he spent all that time listening to José and I dissect the Puerto Rican colonial spirit.” [David D. Kirkpatrick, “Judge’s Mentor: Part Guide, Part Foil”, NYT 6/22/09, p. 1]
All of these involve (coordinate) objects functioning as the notional subject of a following VP — a likely context for nominative case, since the cooordinate NP “feels” subject-like to many speakers, even more likely in a coordinate object, where nominative case is now widespread. (See brief discussion in connection with (5) here.)
… and writing and editing copy. Ben Zimmer points me to “Editor Mark”‘s Google+ page, with an entry that begins:
My Editor Mark page on Facebook saw some use today when Janice Harayda asked me a kind of “you make the call” copy editing question. Here is what she posted:
“The British Home Secretary Theresa May said that ‘it is natural to ask whom polices the police’ [link]. If you had been editing her comments, would you have let that stand?
There’s the linguistic issue — May’s quote is an instance of ISOC (In-situ Subject of an Object Clause) case marking for WHO, with a non-standard (but fairly common) subject whom — and then there’s the question of what a writer or editor should have done with the sentence.
Hilton Als, or one of his editors at the New Yorker, has opted for prescriptively correct (but now very formal and even archaic-sounding) whom in a context where I think who would be stylistically much more natural (discussion of some other cases of “Object whom” here):
Jackie [a man] wants to make love, but Veronica has something on her mind. She’s been seeing someone else, but won’t say whom. Is it their downstairs neighbor, the motherfucker with a hat? (Hilton Als, “War Games” [review of “The Motherfucker with the Hat”], New Yorker 4/25/11, p. 86)
Overheard at my local Gordon Biersch restaurant a few days ago:
as far as us is concerned, …
Strikingly ungrammatical for me. But I think I’ve figured out where it comes from.
From a Gail Collins op-ed piece in the NYT (2/24/11, p. A27), “Revenge of the Pomeranians”:
Also, why is the federal government in danger of shutting down? Whom can I blame for this? Does it have anything to do with what’s going on in Wisconsin? Did Congress pass a budget last year at all? Why not?
The whom caught my eye. It’s prescriptively “correct”, since the lexeme WHO is serving here in an object function (in this case, it’s the direct object of blame), but still it was jarring to me, especially in the context of Collins’s breezy and informal style. (Not that Collins was necessarily responsible for the whom in this column; it might have been introduced by an editor.)
Alana Newhouse, “The Diaspora Need Not Apply” [on who is a Jew], op-ed piece in NYT, 7/16/10:
It will do little good, too, to point out that [“the stringent approach to Jewish law that the Israeli rabbinate promotes”] is well outside the consensus established by Hillel — arguably the greatest rabbi in all of rabbinic Judaism and whom, as Joseph Telushkin argues in a forthcoming book, was willing to convert a pagan on the spot, simply because he’d asked [Hillel to].
That whom remains in the on-line version as of August 3. It looks like a case of ESOC (“extracted subject of an object clause”), a type of usage — one of several — in which accusative whom appears in subject function. ESOC (along with its cousin ISOC) is discussed in a long piece of mine about who vs. whom on Language Log a few years ago. (If you have questions or comments about the technical details, variability in the data, the status of ISOC and ESOC as mistakes or non-standard variants, and the like, I’d suggest that you look at that piece and its follow-up, here, before posting a comment here.)
But in this example several constructions are snarled up together, in such a way that it’s hard to see what might be going on (though, mercifully, Newhouse’s intended meaning seems clear enough, so that no one detected a problem with the sentence).
A nominative conjoined object (NomConjObj for short) is, first of all, a NP which is coordinate in form (consisting of two or more conjoined NPs) and which serves as an object (a direct object or prepositional object). Then, at least one of the conjuncts is visibly nominative — that is, it is a 1st or 3rd person personal pronoun in its nominative form. (Other NPs show no visible evidence of their case.) Although many combinations are attested, only two seem to be really frequent:
NP and I [e.g., “to Kim and I”]
he/she and NP [e.g., “to he and Kim”]
(You will see that both serial position and person/number features are relevant.)
[Clearly, “nominative conjoined object” is an imperfect name, but it’s hard to imagine how to pack all the relevant information into a reasonably short name. And anyway, labels are not definitions.]
The full set of facts about pronoun case in English ranges over quite a bit of territory, including, most notably, AccConjSubjs, as in “Me and Kim went swimming”. The advice literature on the general topic is vast, and I won’t attempt to survey it here, though I point out that MWDEU has an excellent entry (between you and I) on NomConjObjs.
On to some references on NomConjObjs.