Another SOTA?

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Jun 9, 2006, at 11:18 AM, alison murie wrote:

> [stuff from me]
> This is fun.  If I'd given myself time for second thoughts, I'd
> probably
> not have sent my original post....but then we'd not have had this
> entertaining answer.
>
> While sample here is not something I'd be likely to have occasion
> to say:
>
>  " [I've always wanted to be Peter, and now] I *am* Peter.
> the latin rule predicts nominative case for a pronoun in the place of
> "Peter".  but this is godawful:
>     *[I've always wanted to be Peter, and now] I *am* he.
> it's got to be:
>     [I've always wanted to be Peter, and now] I *am* him".....
>
> I do and always have said "This is she" when asked by a phone-
> caller  for
> Alison.
> (I'm usually mistaken for a man or boy, since my normal speaking
> note is
> around E below middle C.)  I would find it awkward to say "This is
> her."

yes.  my point was that the observations about the split-persona
cases hold even for people who have (some) nominative predicative
pronouns ("This is she", "It is I"), as in this next case:

> Of course I would, OTOH, say "That's me" in the photo.

back to the nominative predicative pronouns (and the related case of
nominative pronouns in isolation, as in Q: "Who's there?" A:
"I.")...  for a lot of speakers, this usage is associated with
formality, so that "It's I", with auxiliary reduction, is at least a
bit odd.  so from now on, i'll give examples with unreduced "is".

there's a cline of case preference (for people who have at least some
nominatives; i do not, by the way): if you have nominatives at all,
you have them for  1sg; if you have them for 3sg, you also have them
for 1sg.  when we turn to the plural (1pl or 3pl), it's hard to find
people who are comfortable with nominatives at all: "It is we" in
answer to a question, though the door, about who is at it, or "It is
they" as an announcement about who is at the door.  if you can say
these, you can say all the rest (3sg and 1sg).

i think there are similar effects for nominative pronouns in
isolation, but there are a number of ways for these to occur, so
different constructions would have to be examined separately.

and then there are isolated coordinations, like "you and I" in
various contexts not directly in construction with any verb (again,
there are several constructions here).  i think there's a similar
cline here, and you can see what's at the bottom by noting an ad for
UBS now running in several high-end magazines:
   You & Us
   The difference between being
   listened to and being understood

this is not just ad writers being friendly and folksy, i think
(though that certainly happens); the version "You & We" strikes me as
dreadful, in a way that "You and I" would not be in this context. (i
wouldn't normally *say* "you and I" in such contexts, but i don't
break out in asterisks when i hear it.)

[thanks to thomas grano, whose work on case in coordinate pronouns
caused to the think about these other situations.  grano proposes
that prescriptive pressure -- which is going on in all these
situations -- preferentially affects the more frequent items in a
set, so that for personal pronouns it's 1sg, then 3sg (possibly masc
before fem), then pl.]

>  The who/whom snarl I see most often is in constructions like: "I
> doubt
> that whomever is in charge  here will....", where "whom" is
> actually the
> governing pronoun of an indicative verb in a dependent clause,
> while the
> whole dependent clause is the object of another verb that triggers the
> impulse to get "whom" in there.

especially strong when there's no "that", so the wh-ever word
immediately follows a verb.  *especially* strong when the wh-ever
word immediately follows a preposition, as in "Give it to whomever
answers the door."

answer, reporting, not recommending

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