Hey, guys. I remember about 20 years ago finding a lit crit article
on the "Prufrock" line. It was a philological explanation that, as I
recall, was coherent and pragmatic, though I cannot recall the
argument itself now (I can barely remember what I had for dinner last
night). I thought I had Xeroxed it and put it in a file for articles
I have collected over the years on literary stylistics. But I can't
find the article. Ah, well.  What I do know, though, is that Steven
Pinker explained such seemingly anomalous case problems in compound
phrases (and before him Joseph Emonds).  Here is the explanation that
I've scanned out of THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT.


Probably no "grammatical error" has received as much scorn as "misuse
of pronoun case inside conjunctions (phrases containing two elements
joined by and or or). What teenager has not been corrected for saying
Me and Jennifer are going to the mall? A colleague of mine recalls
that when she was twelve, her mother would not allow her to have her
ears pierced until she stopped saying it. The standard story is that
the accusative pronoun me does not belong in subject position-no one
would say Me is going to the mall-so it should be Jennifer and I.
People tend to misremember the advice as "When in doubt, 'say
so-and-so and I,' not 'so-and-so and me,'" so they unthinkingly
overapply it-a process linguists call hypercorrection- resulting in
"mistakes" like give Al Gore and I a chance and the even more
despised between you and I.

But if the person on the street is so good at avoiding Me is going
and Give I a break, and if even Ivy League professors and former
Rhodes Scholars can't seem to avoid Me and Jennifer are going and
Give Al and I a chance, might it not be the mavens that misunderstand
English grammar, not the speakers? The mavens' case about case rests
on one assumption. if an entire conjunction phrase has a grammatical
feature like subject case, every word inside the phrase has to have
that grammatical feature, too. But that is just false.

Jennifer is singular; you say Jennifer is, not Jennifer are. The
pronoun She is singular; you say She is, not She are. But the
conjunction She and Jennifer is not singular, it's plural; you say
She and Jennifer are, not She and Jennifer is.  So if a conjunction
can have a different grammatical number from the pronouns inside it
(She and Jennifer are), why must it have the same grammatical case as
the pronouns inside it (Give Al Gore and I  a chance)? The answer is
that it need not. A conjunction is an example of a "headless"
construction. Recall that the head of a phrase is the word that
stands for the whole phrase. In the phrase the tall blond man with
one black shoe, the head is the word man, because the entire phrase
gets its properties from man- the phrase refers to a kind of man, and
is third person singular, because that's what man is. But a
conjunction has no head; it is not the same as any of its parts. If
John and Marsha met, it does not mean that John met and that Marsha
met. If voters give Clinton and Gore a chance, they are not giving
Gore his own chance, added on to the chance they are giving Clinton;
they are giving the entire ticket a chance. So just because Me and
Jennifer is a subject that requires subject case, it does not mean
that Me is a subject that requires subject case, and just because Al
Gore and I is an object that requires object case, it does not mean
that I is an object that requires object case.

On grammatical grounds, the pronoun is free to have any case it wants
The linguist Joseph Emonds has analyzed the Me and Jennifer Between
you and I phenomenon in great technical detail. He concludes the
language that the mavens want us to speak is not only not English, it
is not a possible human language (390-92).

The Emonds study Pinker refers to is

Emonds, Joseph. "Grammatically Deviant Prestige Constructions." In A
FESTSCHRIFT FOR SOL SAPORTA.  Seattle: Noit Amrofer, 1986.

I hope this answers everyone's questions and restores Eliot's
reputation as a speaker of English. Actually, he may have been a
great poet, but Eliot was an unrepentant anti-Semite as well. So I'm
not that sure whether Pinker or I (Pinker or me?)  really want to
restore Eliot. Ah, I guess I do. I like "Prufrock" myself. And I
dislike the language mavens, those dyed in the wool prescriptivists
who would bemirch reputations on false linguistic premises, almost as
much as Pinker does. Set Eliot free! He COULD speak English and write
grammatical poetry. He just wasn't good at social issues.  Max

Max Morenberg, Professor
Department of English
Miami University
Oxford, OH 45056
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