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

[Herb Stahlke]

Discourse-motivated grammatical changes are rarely as fully regular as sound change, which is one of the problems with arguing for discourse motivation.  But what's happened to the English pronouns as case government has become more and more functional is that the pronoun system has broken up along old case and new functional lines.  To argue that we still have just two sets of pronouns is to ignore the phonological non-derivability of the weak forms in a lot of pronoun+aux contractions.

Your example of "me gets it" is interesting because the strong pronoun behaves as if it were a noun and takes 3s agreement.  This happens also in a fair number of West African languages that distinguish between strong and weak pronoun forms and the weak form is historically but not synchronically derivable from the strong form.

Herb

>>> laurence.horn at YALE.EDU 04/20/01 01:22AM >>>
At 1:15 PM -0500 4/20/01, Herb Stahlke wrote:
>I still lean away.  I may be missing something, but in the conjoined
>structure the pronouns cannot be unstressed, which means they are in
>focus in this construction.  I don't disagree with his statement,
>that you quote; I just don't see it as supporting his claim that
>it's still case-governed behavior.  It looks a lot more like
>discourse function than like case.
>
>Herb
>
But no matter how strongly the pronoun is focused or stressed or
contrastively contextualized when it IS the (sole) subject, it can't
be ME (or HIM, or HER):

*No, you can't have it, ME gets it!
*No, you're wrong--HIM didn't win, HER won!

It's only when it's NOT the subject that it can show up in the
so-called accusative.  If this were really a matter of discourse
function, these would all be good (since stress IS a matter of
discourse function, these are all in fact stressed, but still
nominative:

*No, you can't have it, *I* get it!
*No, you're wrong--*HE* didn't win, *SHE* won!


larry