query

[Ronald Kephart]

A few days ago, "Robert Lawless" <robert.lawless at wichita.edu> wrote:

> Why can we say, colloquially speaking, "Me and Tommy went downtown," but we
> can't say, "Me went downtown"?
> 
A couple of responses went to him personally, but as far as I can tell none
came to the list. I'm interested in this topic myself, so I was hoping that
if anyone responds they could do so to the whole list.

Here's what I wrote on the issue over on Anthro-L:

You can say it all over the Caribbean. (I know, I know...)

Chomsky claims that "me and Tommy went..." is correct for English and that
the reason we have such a hard time getting people to say "Tommy and I
went..." is that it's actually wrong (why else would language arts teachers
have to spend so much time on it?). My understanding is that it has
something to do with the salience of the accusative case, but exactly how
this works I'm not sure. I once tried to get it out of Noam in an email and
he referred me somewhere but I've lost that email and I haven't been able to
track down a clear explanation.

Ron