case in personal pronouns

[Willy Vandeweghe]

Dear all

As Jeroen Wiedenhof is raising the issue of personal pronouns, I would like to add a query conderning personal pronouns of my own. At the moment Magda Devos and I are studying a phenomenon of pronoun substitution in West Flemish (a Dutch dialect). As a result of a recent evolution (in the last decades), some varieties of this dialect (and increasingly more of them) tend to substitute the objective form following a  preposition by a subject form. This results in sentences like:

Hij heeft iets tegen ikke
He holds sth against  I
(normally: Hij heeft iets mij - against me)

Ik klappe nie meer tegen gij
I don't talk to you anymore
(normally: Ik klappe nie meer tegen u - in English this opposition is neutralized in one 'you'-form)

Ze zijn kwaad op wijder
They are mad at we
(normally: Ze zijn kwaad op ons - at us)

1 Are there among you who know of other languages or dialects exhibiting this kind of behaviour (there are some dialects in S-W England, according to Katie Wales 1996. Personal pronouns in present-day English. Cambridge: CUPress.)
2 Among the factors that seem to be involved, there is stress (case contrast is replaced by stress contrast), but this most probably is not the whole story. Does anyone  know of other accounts for this phenomenon in relevant literature?

Thanks

Willy Vandeweghe
Department of Translators & Interpreters
Hogeschool Gent
Groot-Brittanniëlaan 45
9000 Gent (Belgium)

tel. ++ 32 9 224 97 31
willy.vandeweghe at hogent.be


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