JTTs point on using I or me.

(Mod - I moved this from a learner's question as I felt they just needed a simple answer, which they received from others, rather than a debate on the issue. This is more appropriate for this section, so others interested in the theory of linguistics can continue if they wish.)
Re: I, me
Posted: 17 Mar 2005 07:57 AM
JTT: This is how this issue is viewed by language scientists:

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CGEL:
Prescriptive works instantiating this sort of aesthetic authoritarianism provide no answer to such obvious questions. They simply assert that grammar dictates things, without supporting their claim from evidence.

The descriptive view would be that when most speakers use a form that our grammar says is incorrect, there is at least a prima facie case that it is the grammmar that is wrong. ... If what is involved were a matter of taste, all evidence would be beside the point. But under the descriptivist viewpoint, grammar is not a matter of taste, nor of aesthetics.

{Examples like the one at issue} show, however, that the only completely secure territory of the nominative in Present-day English is with pronouns functioning as the whole subject in a finite clause.

{Examples like the one at issue}, with 'I' as final coordinate is, however, so common in speech and used by so broad a range of speakers that it has to be recognized as a variety of Standard English, ..."
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http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_01_24_thenewrepublic.html

Probably no "grammatical error" has received as much scorn as "misuse" of pronoun case inside conjunctions (phrases with two parts joined by [and] or [or]). What teenager has not been corrected for saying [Me and Jennifer are going to the mall]? The standard story is that the object pronoun does not belong in subject position -- no one would say [Me is going to the mall] -- so it should be [Jennifer and I]. People tend to misremember the advice as "When in doubt, say 'so-and-so and I', not 'so-and-so and me'," so they unthinkingly overapply it, resulting in hyper-corrected solecisms like [give Al Gore and I a chance] and the even more despised [between you and I].

But if the person on the street is so good at avoiding [Me is going] and [Give I a break], and even former Rhodes Scholars and Ivy League professors can't seem to avoid [Me and Jennifer are going] and [Give Al and I a chance], might it not be the mavens that misunderstand English grammar, not the speakers? The mavens' case about case rests on one assumption: if an entire conjunction phrase has a grammatical feature like subject case, every word inside that phrase has to have that grammatical feature, too. But that is just false.

[Jennifer] is singular; you say [Jennifer is], not [Jennifer are]. The pronoun [She] is singular; you say [She is], not [She are]. But the conjunction [She and Jennifer] is not singular, it's plural; you say [She and Jennifer are], not [She and Jennifer is.] So a conjunction can have a different grammatical number from the pronouns inside it. Why, then, must it have the same grammatical [case] as the pronouns inside it? The answer is that it need not.

A conjunction is just not grammatically equivalent to any of its parts. If John and Marsha met, it does not mean that John met and that Marsha met. If voters give Clinton and Gore a chance, they are not giving Gore his own chance, added on to the chance they are giving Clinton; they are giving the entire ticket a chance. So just because [Al Gore and I] is an object that requires object case, it does not mean that is an object that requires object case. By the logic of grammar, the pronoun is free to have any case it wants.

The linguist, Joseph Emonds has analysed the 'Me and Jennifer/Between you and I' phenomenon in great technical detail. He concludes that the language that the mavens want us to speak is not only not English, it is not a possible human language!


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