Re: Copula

On 3/19/07, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
> even in a non-ergative language not all bivalent verbs have
> nominative and accusative (subject & direct objects). Latin has a whole
> lot of bivalent verbs where the object is regarded as _indirect_ and
> these verbs have nominative and dative; nor can the dative object become
> the subject of a passive form. IIRC German also has some verbs that
> behave like this.
Indeed. For example, "Ich danke dir, ich helfe dir, ich gehöre dir,
ich gehorche dir, ich glaube dir".

> Latin also has bivalent verbs that have nominative and genitive, and
> others that have nominative and ablative.
German also has a least one verb with nominative and genitive: "Ich
gedenke seiner". It sounds rather stilted, formal, or old-fashioned to
me. I'm not sure whether there are others; if there are, I suspect
they will also be formal or old-fashioned.

> But the nominative~accusative business is not so straightforward in
> modern spoken English. For example nobody, I think, would say *"She was
> talking about I", but always: "She was talking about me". Yet very many
> people (and IME the majority nowadays) do say "She was talking about you
> and I".  The I~me distinction is not the simple ol'
> nominative~accusative or subject~object distinction.
Or, conversely, "Him and me went to the store", yet I doubt the same
speaker would produce *"Me went to the store".

I think it's more akin to the French I~moi distinction rather than the
German ich~mich: that is, case is not the salient distinction.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>