query

[Ellen Contini-Morava]

Here are a couple of factors that might be relevant:

a) the "object" pronouns are used in more syntactic contexts than the 
"subject" pronouns (note that "you", originally the object form of "ye", 
is the one that got generalized in English), which would lead to a 
general favoring of the object form (see also Sapir's classic riff on 
the simplification of English pronouns in his chapter on Drift, in 
Language);

b) since "me" when not in a conjoined phrase is associated with 
post-verbal or post-prepositional position rather than with initial 
position, that would discourage "me went downtown" (maybe also avoidance 
of Tarzan-speak);

c)  even sticklers for Pronominal Correctness wouldn't say "I and Tommy 
went downtown".  The most common thing that "I" is conjoined with is 
"you" as in "you and I", where it comes second (see paper by Joyce 
Boyland in Bybee and Hopper, Frequency & the Emergency of Linguistic 
Structure).  Maybe there's an avoidance of "I" as first element in a 
conjoined phrase?

Ellen

Ronald Kephart wrote:
> 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
>
>