Object and subject pronouns

Question

I am in doubt on why it's acceptable to use " She is better than I am" , using a subject pronoun + verb to be instead of an object pronoun at the object of the sentence.Both feel pretty natural to me, but i wanted to understand the reason gramatically.Is there any specific subject for this?

BillJ · Accepted Answer

[1] She is better than [ I am __ ]

[2] She is better than [ me ].

Both are fine and have the same meaning. The difference is in the syntax.

In [1] the pronoun is subject of the comparative clause “I am”. Comparative clauses are usually reduced in some way; here the complement of “am” is omitted and represented by the gap notation "__"

But in [2] the pronoun is not a clause but an immediate complement of "than". "Me" is thus a noun phrase functioning as complement of the preposition “than”.

Note: an alternative analysis of [2] would be to analyse "me" as subject of a reduced comparative clause in the same way as "I" is in [1], though the reduction would have been taken one step further, and of course the missing verb could not be inserted. In this analysis, "I" would also be possible here as a very formal alternative to "me".

Object and subject pronouns

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