[Ads-l] Heard: "I've had dinner...

[Laurence Horn]

There's a nice paper by Angermeyer and Singler on the factors involved in this variation, concentrating on 1st person cases:

Angermeyer, Philip & John Singler. 2003. The case for politeness: Pronoun variation in co-ordinate NPs in object position in English. _Language Variation and Change_ 15: 171-209.

They look at the three options in such cases: "vernacular _me and X_", "standard _X and me_", and "polite _X and I_", the last o which some would call hypercorrect rather than merely polite.  Of course in third person cases like the one below, politeness is less obviously involved, at least directly.  There's other interesting work on the variation by Nicholas Sobin, Thomas Grano, and Arnold Zwicky.

LH


> On Aug 22, 2015, at 9:19 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> The TV chattering classes - and their interlocutors - almost never say
> "him"  in sentences like that .  Or "me," for that matter (they say
> "myself").
> 
> 
> JL
> 
> On Sat, Aug 22, 2015 at 6:24 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      Heard: "I've had dinner...
>> 
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> 
>> with _he_ and his wife."
>> 
>> 
>> Somewhere or other, I kinda-maybe-perhaps glanced at a suggestion that
>> Nominative case may be privileged/licensed/justified/whatever the jargon is
>> by the distance of the pronoun from the governing verb or preposition, so
>> that, in this case, we expect
>> 
>> with *him* and his wife,
>> 
>> given that the pronoun occurs immediately after the preposition.
>> 
>> OTOH,
>> 
>> The Smuggler: A Tale - Volume 1 - Page 188
>> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__books.google.com_books-3Fid-3D3DLBE1AAAAMAAJ&d=AwIBaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=wFp3X4Mu39hB2bf13gtz0ZpW1TsSxPIWYiZRsMFFaLQ&m=376dQOGE-yYmrxDadLr12lBkZHGoYNLSGHFUQO0r7f4&s=rtZqoy4JU8NCu_R1J0MaOGYD3UZ6t-PXU9gSNm5ljeM&e= 
>> John Banim - 1831 - =E2=80=8ERead
>> Let _he_ and you have the pit open, in the garden, about eleven, to-morrow
>> night" - she whispered - "So, now for it, Jane!"
>> --=20
>> -Wilson
>> -----
>> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
>> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>> -Mark Twain
>> 
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>> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
> 
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