Re: THEORY: case systems [was Viko Notes]

Marcus Smith
> On Wed, 26 Jun 2002, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
>
> > (Note that your first example is almost always an instance
> > of hypercorrection, in that that speaker usually doesn't also say *"give
> > it to Jim and he" or "give it to Jim and they".
>
> This is the standard interpretation, but is probably wrong. As far back as
> can be traced by written records, Indo-European languages have been
> putting non-initial conjuncts in the nominative case (not consistently,
> but as an option).
The evidence strongly suggests that nonsubjective "and I" did indeed
originate as a hypercorrection (though it is no longer hypercorrective),
and hence that the cross-linguistic parallels you cite serve only to
demonstrate the general point that some sorts of morphosyntactic
marking are weakened by coordination. That is, coordination has a
predispositive effect on case mismatches, but the actual aetiology of
this particular change is hypercorrection.

The evidence is this:
(1) A prescriptive rule ordaining that the first person singular
pronoun be ordered last in coordination, misinterpreted as a rule
requiring "I" rather than "me".
(2) A prescriptive rule stigmatizing conjunct "me" as subject of
a finite clause, and furthermore prescribing "I" as subject of
a nonfinite clause (contrary to the general trend of usage).
(3) The distribution of nonsubjective "and I" across registers,
text-types and sociolects: although it is rapidly spreading, I
believe that a large and diverse enough corpus would show it
starts out as formal rather than informal, spoken rather than
written, and originating in a particular stratum of the middle
class that is particularly susceptible to prescriptively driven
hypercorrection.

> It is also untrue that these mismatches only occur with "I", though this
> is also what you frequently read or hear. Shakespeare used lines like
> "between my good man and he" (Merry Wives). This use of "I" is more common
> than the others, but it is not unique.
I suspect that those older examples are part of a different
phenomenon, where again the case mismatch is conditioned by
the coordination, but the actual cause is not hypercorrective
but semantic.

As for contemporary English, if "and he/she/they/we" is occurring,
I think the stats would show that it is due to generalization of
the already established "and I" pattern.

--And.