Brett,

To respond completely to your thoughts here would take more research than I have access to at the moment.  Certainly the history of non-case governed uses of pronouns goes back to Early Middle English, maybe to Late Old English, but the course of development from Old English case-governed usage to Present Day English function-governed usage is the issue you're raising--and it's a good one.  I'm sure we would find considerable variation across dialect and register at any point in the past nine centuries, but I don't have data available on this.  Perhaps others on the list who have worked on the history of English can help here.  Until SVO word order became firmly fixed, as well as the orders Noun + 's + Noun and Noun [PP of Noun PP], some case governed usage would persist.  Once those orders became fixed, more positional marking of grammatical relations and functional government of pronoun form would occur.  But I don't have data at hand on all of this.  

I know you don't assume that Formal Standard English is static, but people often make that assumption.  It's worth pointing out that Formal Standard English does change, not only by the acceptance of formerly banned forms and by the creation of new rules not based on descriptive data.  A case of the former might be the increasing acceptance of "hopefully" as a sentence adverb and an example of the latter would be the Possessive Antecedent Prohibition, which dates only to the early 1940s.

There's an interesting paper for someone:  the propounding and acceptance of new prescriptive rules.   David Mulroy in his The War against Grammar points out that the prohibition on split infinitives dates back no farther than the 1860s.

Herb  

-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Brett Reynolds
Sent: Thursday, August 19, 2010 10:12 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Case of disappearing cases
Importance: Low

On 2010-08-18, at 8:54 PM, Herb wrote:

> Those rules weren't an accurate representation of English pronoun use in the 18th c. any more than they would have been five centuries earlier or two and a half later.   But they are requirements of Formal Standard English today.

Yes, they are part of current formal standard English, but if they've been used in the non-standard way since middle English, then I'm not sure what basis there is for claiming that spoken English is shifting from case marking to focus marking. The word 'shift' implies change, but is the evidence for the change there?

Best,
Brett

-----------------------
Brett Reynolds
English Language Centre
Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning Toronto, Ontario, Canada [log in to unmask]

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