(1) My sister arrived at the movie theater before I.

Do you suppose that the oddness of the above sentence
has more to do with sentence stress than with
ellipsis?
"I" gets a heavier stress in this sentence-final
position than we are used to hearing.  Consider how
much more  "normal" the following sounds, even though
purists would argue its correctness:

 (2) My sister arrived at the movie theater before me.

Since we tend to hear "I" more frequently in
sentence-initial positions and "me" in more
sentence-final positions, our ears are more accustomed
to a light "I" and a heavy "me."

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