Hi, Craig,

The listserv will not accept my posts, so I wonder if you would post 
this for me as to "before".

"Before us" is just another example of the ongoing dispute about 
pronoun case. Case is not a strong grammatical category in English  -- 
it has been eroding for hundreds of years. Witness the death of "whom" 
and the overly formal sound of "it is I".

I like to see what is happening in English as similar to what happened 
in French. French has a phenomenon called the "disjunctive pronoun" (I 
don't think this is a linguistic term). Objective case pronouns are 
used in most of the slots in which they are being "incorrectly" used in 
contemporary English, for example:

C'est moi!     It's me.
Apres vous!    After you! (it would be "apres moi", I'm sure; I'm not a 
native speaker, but even my weak French disallows "apres je")

Moi, je n'aime pas ça.     Me, I don't like that.

There are more examples. This was what I wrote my very first 
linguistics paper on, way way way  back in undergraduate school!

I don't have the tome with me, but I believe the new Huddleston and 
Pullum grammar classifies all items such as "before" as prepositions 
_only_, treating clauses following them as clausal objects of the 
preposition. Now there's a perspective for you!

Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel.: 805.756.2184
Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/