Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent)

[Carol F. Justus]

>----Original Message-----
>>From:     	Leo A. Connolly [SMTP:connolly at memphis.edu]
>>Sent:    	Wednesday, July 04, 2001 2:49 AM

>.	.	.

>>We formerly had such things -- think "methinks" -- an object in preverbal
>>position not controlling verb agreement.  We have since solved our problem
>>by making _me_ into a true subject _I_ -- with no change in meaning!

>I can see what you're getting at, but isn't this a bit of an
>oversimplification?  We haven't changed any object into a subject; we've
>simply dropped the peculiar "methinks" from the language, mostly because it
>looks so wrong to anyone unfamiliar with older forms of English.  If anyone
>had remembered that "me-" is a dative and that "-thinks" is a reflex of AS.
>"þyncan" ("to seem") and not "þencan" ("to think"), we'd probably all
>still be saying it.  As it is, however, "methinks" ended up being the last
>remnant of a verb otherwise lost in ModE., & so it was prone to be
>misunderstood and finally abandoned.

>A. G. Kozak
>Department of Classics
>University of California at Berkeley

Some linguists think that the OE 'me thinks' (see also Shakespearean 'me
seems') represents a more general pattern also found in Classical Latin
constructions such as 'me pudet' ('me shames'). If so, the shift from 'me
thinks' to 'I think' is not an isolated change but an example of a more
general change in which a class of (impersonal) verbs regularized a pattern
from elsewhere in the grammar, the pattern of taking nominative case
subjects with subject-verb agreement. Before it was lost, of course, it had
become a relic form that may well have been prone to misunderstanding. Its
relic status, however, marks it as precious data for what the earlier
linguistic system was like and the 'me' > 'I' change as indicative of a
more general change in the linguistic system.

Carol Justus
Linguistics Research Center
University of Texas at Austin