nomconjobjs: between you and me/I

[Victor Steinbok]

Interestingly, similar disparities in other combinations may well be due
to structural reasons and neither errors in raw aggregation nor to odd
patterns of use. For example, my search of "between he and she" produced
several pages of top-level hits that discuss personal preferences in
choosing a generic 3rd person pronoun. You are not going to get the same
interference in "between he and her" search, but you might in "between
him and her". On the other hand, "between you and I/me" is convenient
compared to using prepositions like "to" and "from". In "between you and
me" the "and" is essentially disjunctive and requires the presence of
both "you" and "me/I" within the same semantic unit. "From you and I" in
Google searches may well cross phrase or sentence boundaries--in fact,
most top level hits contain a comma or a period (or parenthesis) before
"and", essentially rendering the comparative numbers useless.

     VS-)

On 2/22/2010 12:40 PM, Baker, John wrote:
>          It's difficult to get good numbers on the comparative frequency
> of "between you and me" and "between you and I."  Google reports raw
> hits of 26 million for "between you and I" and only 975,000 for "between
> you and me" (slightly fewer in each case with SafeSearch turned on).
> However, actually clicking to see how many hits can be found produces
> much smaller and more comparable numbers:  649 for "between you and I,"
> 588 for "between you and me" (in each case, with the caveat that Google
> has omitted some entries very similar to those displayed).
>

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