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

[Arnold Zwicky]

From: Herb Stahlke <hstahlke at GW.BSU.EDU>:

 >I lean more to Mark's statement on case in English.  Certainly, the
 >reflexes of ME nominative pronouns are still used consistently as
 >subjects if the pronoun is the sole expression of the subject.  Their
 >strong forms also show up as emphatic sole subjects,
 >but the weak forms combine with auxiliary verbs to reduce almost
 >unanalyzably.

??

in these combinations the pronouns are not reduced at all (or
at the most, have laxed vowels); "I" is quite robust in "I'm".

i fail utterly to see any distinction between strong and weak
forms of I/SHE...  there are accented and unaccented occurrences,
to be sure, but lone-pronoun subjects can be either accented or
unaccented, and so can such subjects in combination with reduced
auxiliaries.

 >However, when the subject consists of more than one word, the
 >reflexes of the ME dative/accusative forms show up, as in "Me and
 >him are leaving soon" or "Us two'll meet you there".

i'm well aware of these facts, which are of course the subject of
still more prescriptions.  i just don't see how they bear on the
issues at hand.

 >Combined with the prevalence of objective forms after forms of BE
 >that Arnold summarized nicely for us earlier, this begins to look
 >much more functional that case-governed.  That is, the objective
 >forms are the focus forms, except when the pronoun is sole subject.
 >The objective and subjective weak forms still show up in their case
 >roles if they are topical, but that's about as far as
 >case-government goes in ModE.

i'm sorry, but insofar as you can vary focus or topicality while
leaving the syntax constant - by accent placement, or by supplying
discourse context - the facts remain completely the same: "I" is used
for (certain) subjects, and "me" everywhere else (for some speakers,
those with "me and him" and "us two" consistently as subjects, this is
the entire description; for others of us, the account needs to be
a bit more complex).

are you maintaining that HIM in "I SAW 'im" is necessarily focused, or
topical, or both?  your notions of focus/topic don't seem to align
with accent at all (beyond the fact that conjuncts in coordination
bear some accent).  is there some sense of focus/topic here that has
nothing to do with accent?

in any case, i don't see how reference to focus, topic, *or* accent
gives an account of the distribution of forms in any variety of
current english.  as far as i can see, such varieties could be used as
textbook illustrations of structural (rather than prosodic or
pragmatic or discourse-functional or semantic) determination of forms.

 >I think Mencken was one of the earliest to write in detail about
 >some of these changes.  I have it in the one-volume edition of The
 >American Language.

jespersen was not unaware of the changes.  the question is how the
current varieties are to be described, though.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)