HL Mencken devoted several pages of The American Language to the replacement of subjective pronouns forms with objective, and there has been some modern analysis and description of the phenomenon.  It involves constructions like

Who's there?  Me.
Me and Judy went to a movie.
Bill ran faster than me.
Me, I wouldn't do it that way.
Us two will meet you at the mall.
 
The high frequency of "between you and I" is one of the few reversals of this pattern.  

I suspect what's happening in spoken English is a shift from case marking to focus marking.  That is, the objective pronouns, which have historically appeared in object position, have taken on the frequent "new information" or "focus" role of final direct objects.  As case marking has declined in usage, with apologies for the pun, the focus function has become identified with the former object pronoun set, accounting for their appearance in sentences like those above.  Case marking is giving way to discourse function.

Herb

-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Brett Reynolds
Sent: Monday, August 16, 2010 9:22 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Case of disappearing cases
Importance: Low

On 2010-08-16, at 3:58 PM, Geoff wrote:

> has everyone noticed that the objective case is slowly disappearing?

The COCA shows no clear trend for 'me' since 1990.
In the COHA, 'me' has been increasing since 1940, though it's lower now that the early 1800s (I think there's something funky about the first two decades in that corpus.) In the Time corpus, the low was in the 1930s and the most recent decade was the most 'me'-ful.

There might be a case for a slow wane in 'them' with the 1830s being the peak decade (2,687.51 per million words) in the COHA and the 2000s being the nadir (1,858.83 PMW), but that's not backed up by the Time corpus.

The Time corpus shows a dramatic rise in the use of 'us' since the 1920s, with most of that coming in the last two decades, but the COHA shows a drop from the 1820s to the 1930s and then little change since then.

So, overall no, I haven't noticed the objective case slowly disappearing, but perhaps these timescales aren't long enough. Or perhaps Geoff is referring specifically to syncretism in 'who', where the 'whom' form seems to be about half as common now as it was in the early 1900s and only one sixth as common as in the early 1800s.

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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