Does this mean, 'The children jump and shouts," is okay too?


On Fri, 30 Mar 2001, Max Morenberg wrote:

> 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
> [log in to unmask]

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