Back to you and I (who went to row the boat ashore)

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Fri Feb 19 17:01:04 UTC 2010


At 1:36 AM -0500 2/19/10, Judy Prince wrote:
>So you were caught out hyperurbanising, Robin.
>
>The studies that Laurence refers to may cover some issues I'll raise.  I'd
>be delighted to know about them.
>
Some recent published work from two rather different perspectives:

Sobin, Nicholas. 1997.  Agreement, default rules, and grammatical
viruses. _Linguistic Inquiry_ 28: 318-43.

Angermeyer, Philipp & John Singler. 2003.  The case for politeness:
Pronoun variation in co-ordinate NPs in object position in English.
_Language Variation and Change_ 15: 171-209.


The former, written within a Chomskyan framework and in particular
the newfangled "virus theory", argues for the ungrammaticality for
prestige variants like "Mary and I left early", "It was I", and
"There are books on the table".  The latter paper is more inclusive
and less theoretically avant-garde.

The best and most comprehensive work on the topic is an undergraduate
honors thesis written in 2006 by Thomas Grano at Stanford under the
supervision of Arnold Zwicky.  It's called "Me and her" meets "he and
I" Case, person, and linear ordering in English coordinated pronouns"
and can be downloaded from the author's web site,
http://home.uchicago.edu/~tgrano/.

LH

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