In dealing with matters like these, we’re dealing with the same sorts of matters of taste and judgment that characterize dress and table manners.  These are not questions of right or wrong but of the sort of impression one wants to make on a particular audience.  Scott’s clearly right that “between you and I” does not make the kind of impression one might wish to make in a very formal context.  However, it’s become so common that it would probably overlooked in speech, certainly moreso than in writing.

 

“The committee voted it on” is a marvelous sentence.  You can vote someone on (to) a committee or off it, so elliptically you can vote someone on or off, which is different from “voting on someone/something,” where the meaning can only be that someone/something is the issue at stake in the vote.  In this latter sense, “vote on” is an inseparable phrasal verb and such sentences can be made passive.  “Vote off” feels different.  We can “vote someone off” and we can “vote off a whole lot of people at once,” so “vote off” looks separable, except that the latter example is a case of heavy NP shift, which makes it a discourse phenomenon similar to the obligatory placement of the particle after an object pronoun.  Maybe it is possible to say, about a vote to elect a committee to carry out the garbage that “we’ll vote on all the people who missed today’s meeting,” where “on” gets stressed and we clearly have heavy NP shift. 

 

So is “vote someone on (to the committee)” an obligatorily separated phrasal verb which can have a postposed object only if the object is a heavy NP?  I’m not sure that this is a different syntactic phenomenon from Particle Shift.

 

But back to “between you and I.”  There’s been a tendency in English going back centuries for the object pronouns to become discourse focus pronouns and for subject pronouns to be treated as topic pronouns.  Since subjects are usually topics, the subject set will typically appear in subject position, but only if the pronoun is the complete subject.  As soon as we add another pronoun or noun, as in “you and I,” there is a strong tendency to say “you and me” or, more likely “me and you.”  We get the same use of object pronouns in cases like the following:

 

Predicate Nominative:  Who’s there?  It’s me.

Subject + number:  Us two are going to the movies.

Left dislocation:  Me, I wouldn’t do it that way.

Coordinate subject:  Me and Bill are going to the movies.

Single word sentence:  Who’s there?  Me.

 

While hypercorrection is a common and reasonable explanation for “between you and I,” I don’t find it fully convincing.  Because 1^st and 2^nd person are always topical in a conversation, “I” in “between you and I” reflects that status and so would sound right to a lot of speakers, not just as a hypercorrection but as a grammatical form that makes consistent sense.

 

That said, prescriptive rules are no respecters of language change.  Prescriptively we’ll have almost as strong a sanction on “between you and I” as we have on “ain’t.”  There’s probably no point in fighting either the prescriptive tendency or common usage in a case like this.

 

Herb

 

 

I was on a committee reviewing the bylaws of an organization.  I missed a meeting

and received the final ballot for voting on changes.  Noticing a new change, I asked

how that change had gotten on the ballot.  The obvious response was, “The

committee voted it on.”

 

In dealing with “between you and I”, I use the double object of the preposition and

always put ‘between’ in with the other prepositions.  Because I always start a

course with an introductory lecture outlining, I use double objects of a preposition

to show how easy the class will be.  Frequently, some student will ask, “you mean

you can’t say “between you and I”?  The other students laugh and I respond that

one may say ‘between you and I’ or ‘Me and John is going to town.’  No one forces

you to use correct English when you talk.  You may be evaluated by your speech if

you apply for a job above manual labor in many cases.  Your writing will almost

certainly be evaluated when applying for college or even clerical positions. 

 

The level of literacy has dropped so low that fewer applicants are excluded by poor

English today and even literate reviewers tend to drop their standards when reviewing

an application from a non-native English speaker.

 

In looking at the number or errors that I make in typing on line, I wonder whether even

lists as fascinating, entertaining, and helpful as ATEG are not contributing to the

problem: I an one of the many who have difficulty in catching errors on screen—and

the grammar checks are ridiculous—they have even declined in quality since the

early WordStar products.

 

Scott Catledge, PhD/STD

Professor Emeritus

history & languages

 

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