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Re: THEORY: case systems [was Viko Notes]

From:And Rosta <a-rosta@...>
Date:Thursday, June 27, 2002, 0:21
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.