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

[Arnold Zwicky]

From: Mark Odegard <markodegard at HOTMAIL.COM>

  >>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.

well, there are only a few words that still have distinct forms, so in
one sense the distinction is disappearing.  but *for those words* the
distinction seems quite robust (possibly because the forms I/WE,
SHE/HER, HE/HIM, WE/US, THEY/THEM are so different phonologically); in
particular, we don't see the usual symptoms of inflectional death:
widespread variation between forms, followed by the widespread
replacement of one form by the other.

instead, I/SHE/HE/WE/THEY are used, invariably, by almost all modern
speakers/writers, when the personal pronouns are the entire subjects
of their (finite) clauses, and ME/HER/HIM/US/THEM are used, again
invariably, in all but a few other contexts.  most occurrences of
these pronouns have one form, and cannot have the other.  there is no
significant tendency for one set to encroach generally on the
territory of the other, especially in their central and most frequent
contexts; we don't find ME SAW THE PENGUINS as an alternative to, or
replacement for, I SAW THE PENGUINS (not to mention ME AM/IS YOUR
FRIEND for I AM YOUR FRIEND), or THE PENGUINS SAW I as an alternative
to, or replacement for, I SAW THE PENGUINS.  in fact, the
subject-marking function of forms like I is so strong that people are
inclined to interpret THE PENGUINS SAW I as an alternative to I SAW
THE PENGUINS, with odd constituent order, rather than as an odd way of
saying THE PENGUINS SAW ME.

 >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.

the I/SHE... forms are intimately (for some speakers, exclusively)
associated with one syntactic function/relation, namely subject.  that
means that the distinction between the two sets of forms is a matter
of grammatical case, by any reasonably standard definition of
"grammatical case".  the personal pronoun forms of current english are
indisputably case-dependent.  it's just that the details of that
dependence are rather different in current english than in some other
languages.

the details of how the grammatical cases are marked are not the same
in finnish or japanese or turkish or hindi as they are in, say,
classical latin, but that doesn't cause us to say that these languages
lack case marking. why should we treat current english any
differently?

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)