english pronoun case (was Re: everybody...their)

[Arnold Zwicky]

we have now drifted back into the territory of english pronoun case,
in particular the case of predicatives, the celebrated prescriptive
"It is I."  but first, a story - from the letters page of the New York
Times (1/26/01, p.  A22):

        Grammatical to the End

 To the Editor:
  "A Teacher's Lasting Impressions," by D.T. Max (Op-Ed,
 Jan. 22), prompts me to tell my story.
  My high school senior-class English teacher, Miss
 Sullivan, taught us social graces, table manners, grammar
 and English.  All of her students at our small high school
 in Central Islip kept in touch with her after she moved
 away to the extent that we could.
  After 20 years, I heard that she was in a hospital in
 Queens and was dying.  I made the trip to the hospital to
 find her proppoed up in her bed, all alone, with an oxygen
 mask over her face.  I timidly walked into the room and
 approached her.  I said, "Miss Sullivan, Miss Sullivan,
 it's me, Dan Greenberg.
  She responded through her mask, "It is I."
                DANIEL GREENBERG
                Islip, N.Y., Jan. 24, 2001

-----------------
what a senseless waste of near-final breaths...

but to return to data, sobin (1997 article in LingI: "Agreement,
default rules, and grammatical viruses") offers three sorts of
predicative pronoun examples where he judges the *nominative* forms to
be of low-to-zero grammaticality:

[sobin's examples have uncontracted forms of BE.  in my judgment,
they all get worse with contracted forms.]

 (a) plural pronouns: It is ?*we/?*they.

 (b) pronouns not adjacent to form of BE: *It is just/only I.

(in my judgment, this one gets even worse if it's split between
question and answer:  Q: Who's out there?  A: *Just/Only I.)

 (c) [not characterized by sobin, but at least]
     sentences with subjects other than IT:
           *The person in the purple shirt is/was I.

(in this example, sobin says, "no one says _I_.")

sobin's claim is essentially that the grammar of modern english has
accusative pronouns in predicatives, quite generally, but grammatical
instruction requires nominative pronouns in formal speech/writing, for
the "announcement" construction with subject IT and unmodified
singular predicative pronoun, and perhaps in a few other
constructions.  the core idea is that accusative forms are massively
the default for predicatives, and that the prescribed nominatives are
intrusions into what is otherwise a system of great generality and
simplicity.

predicative pronouns serve to identify referents, in several
different senses of "identify".  there's the announcement type;
"It is I/me" identifies the speaker (by supplying a voice sample,
and then perhaps some further identifying information, like "your
brother" or "Dan Greenberg").  example (c) is different; "The
person in the purple shirt is/was me/*I" identifies the purple-shirted
person (in some scene) as the speaker.  i believe, with sobin, that
nominatives are pretty rotten here:

 (d) [pointing at people in a photo] *There's/That's I!

then there's identification in the sense of hypothesizing or
asserting identity between two referents; nominatives are awful
here:

 (e) *It's as if you're _I_, only more articulate.
 (f) *Kim is becoming I, bit by bit.
 (g) *Kim is being I in the play.

one context in which predicative nominatives are especially
awful is with infinitival "be" form of BE:

 (h) *You wouldn't want to be I.
 (i) *I need to be free to be I.
 (j) *Just be I for a week; then you'll see how hard things are.
 (k) Want to have a better life?  *Just be I.
 (l) When they assigned roles for the play of my young life,
        *Robin made Sandy be I.
        *I watched Sandy be I.
 (m) Q: Who's responsible for this?
     A: *That  would/could/has to   be I.

this are judgments, of course.  it would be interesting to see
what turns up in searches of very large corpora for occurrences
of nominative pronouns in predicatives; perhaps this has already
been done?

(prescriptivists might well be unmoved by the discovery that the
frequency of these pronouns is vanishingly small, outside of "It
is/was I/he/she".  after all, some might say that, on some matters,
almost everyone is just *wrong* almost all of the time.)

sobin also considers, very briefly, the notorious examples with
THAN (Sandy is taller than ?I/?me).  those who prescribe "I"
here maintain that THAN *is never* a preposition, but that's
another kettle of sea serpents.

sobin doesn't consider the exceptive constructions with BUT,
EXCEPT, or OTHER THAN, where the handbook prescription is often
for "I" only, as in the to-me exceedingly dubious examples

 (n)  Q: Who left early?  A: Everyone but/except/other than  I.

the big quirk grammar has some discussion of the "formal" nominative
vs. the "informal" accusative in exceptives.  (in several places quirk
et al. seem to take the position that if there are a few very vocal
commentators who proscribe some widespread everyday usage as
"non-standard", then the usage gets described as "formal" - rather
than, say, "hyper-formal" or "pretentious" - and writers who can't
bring themselves to use these "formal" variants are encouraged to
rephrase so as to avoid the choice entirely.)  but quirk et
al. realize that some of the resulting examples are preposterous.  in
the case of exceptives, they distinguish a "subject territory" in a
clause from an "object territory" and confine the "formal" nominatives
to the subject territory:

 (o)  ["formal"] Nobody but/except/other than  I complained.
 (p)  ["hypercorrect"]  Nobody complained but/except/other than  I.

(i take the label "hypercorrect" to be a way of starring the example
without directly insulting hard-line nominativists.)

the big point here is that the domain of nominative pronouns that
are not straightforwardly subjects of their clauses, *even* for
those who claim to routinely say/write things like "It is I", is
incredibly restricted.  it follows that, rather than treating the
accusatives as a special case, they should be taken as the default,
the norm in fact, within this domain, with the occasional possibility
of nominatives treated as highly constrained exceptions - perhaps
as idioms, perhaps (a la sobin) as unnatural instrusions.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)