Nobel Prize for Archaeological Grammar

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Aug 21, 2007, at 6:11 AM, Laurence Urdang wrote:

> Heard today on WOR710, 0505, by Shelley Strickler:
>                                   dived
>   for "dove":
>   "I scuba-dived in Cancun."

certainly non-standard.  an interesting case, because it illustrates
one of the three ways in which non-standard morphological variants
can differ from standard ones:

non-standard continues older irregular variant, standard has
regularized (dialect "kine", standard "cows")

standard continues older irregular variant, non-standard has
regularized (standard "sought", non-standard "seeked")

standard continues older regular variant, non-standard has innovated
by analogy with other forms (standard "dived", non-standard "dove",
by analogy with "drive"/"drove" etc.)

>   I wonder if I shall ever again hear "me" instead of "I" in
> contexts like, "He sent it to I and my brother" (let alone the
> inherent rudeness of mentioning oneself before another or others,
> clearly a relic in the annals of politeness).

an extensive treatment by Thomas Grano, with good bibliography up to
2006:

   http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~zwicky/Grano.finalthesis.pdf

two things:

first, the order with 1sg object "I" second is *vastly* more frequent
than the other order.

second, your impression that you hear nothing but nominative
coordinate object pronouns is an attention effect (sometimes caled
the Frequency Illusion): you probably notice almost all the
occurrences of this type that go by, and disregard all the others.
when researchers actually sit down and sift through all the examples
in some corpus, the frequency of the nominatives is surprisingly
small.  and mostly in informal contexts and/or speech.  there are a
fair number of speakers who use the nominatives only in informal
contexts and/or speech but use the standard system in formal writing;
i have several distinguished colleagues who seem to follow this
scheme.  (and there are other systems: see below.)

(note: most people who have the nominative versions also have the
accusative versions.  that is, the phenomenon is variable, and, as
always, we can ask who uses which variants on what occasions for what
persions.)

>   I can tolerate anything as a professional linguist; but as a
> professional writer who tries to cleave to an elevated style, I
> abhor such linguistic miscegenations.

the history of the phenomenon is interesting and complex; its
outlines can be found in several places, including MWDEU.  but see
especially: Philipp S. Angermeyer & John Victor Singler.  2003.  The
case for politeness: Pronoun variation in co-ordinate NPs in object
position in English.  LVC 15.171-209.

in any case, the variant is old, going back in written texts at least
to shakespeare, and no doubt in spoken materials before that.  in the
early years, the nominative forms seem to have been emphatic.  the
OED's published materials have a gap in cites for a while (they have
slips for this period, and you can now find examples in corpora
during this apparent dead period).  in any case, the nominatives re-
appear with some frequency in the 19th century, and soon thereafter
critics began complaining about them.

many of these examples look emphatic; eventually the nominatives
became associated, for some speakers, with formality and
seriousness.  it's now very easy to find such speakers -- who will
tell you that the accusatives are ok in speech, but the nominatives
are "correct" in serious writing.

no doubt there was some effect from hypercorrection, from teachers
trying to eliminate *accusative* coordinate *subject* pronouns ("Me
and him went"), and, perversely, that would promote the understanding
that the nominative objects were formal, serious, and indeed correct.

the short story is that a fair number of speakers now have a
nominative variant for coordinate objects.  think of it as a special
construction for pronoun case in coordination (if you like, you can
think of the nominatives here serving as a "coordinate/comitative
case"), usable in certain contexts.  yes, it's non-standard, but it's
not just mixing things up.

arnold

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