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

[Mark Odegard]

>From: Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>

[whacking away all context]

>but neither (1) nor (2) is the right generalization for english.
>they're sort of close, but they're not quite what's going on
>in this particular language.  (this is not to say that they
>couldn't be the right generalizations for some other languages.)

I have a simpler answer. Just about all case distinctions in the pronouns
are either dying or dead. It's not unexpected.

A better discussion is how Modern English (or perhaps, the successor to ModE
-- 'Post-Modern English', perhaps) is restructuring its no-longer
case-dependent pronouns.

A separate discussion might revolve around the phenomenon of universal
childhood education, and how 'formal English', 'book English' is pounded
into our heads, with a resultant diglossia, and on-thread, how this warps us
educated native speakers' use of the formerly case-dependent pronouns.




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