Becky Friedman, staunch grammarian, comes to your aid in this special podcast episode of English And Such, explaining the history of cased pronouns, what they're good for, and a few choice tips on how to know which word to use. Please click below to listen to "Pronoun Problems". A transcript of the podcast follows the audio link.
Segment
Running Length:
16 minutes 41 seconds
[MUSIC: Kevin MacLeod, "Cool Intro" (from
incompetech.com) -- doubled]
Becky
FRIEDMAN: Hello and welcome to English and Such. This is Becky
Friedman, staunch grammarian, here to talk to you today about pronoun
cases. Before I begin, I'd like to give my thanks to Mignon Fogarty,
whose Grammar Girl
podcast inspired this episode. If you enjoy this podcast, or if you
love grammar as much as I do, please check out her show at
quickanddirtytips.com.
FRIEDMAN: A few weeks ago, I was teaching a class of
grade five students, and I asked them a question to test their
knowledge: "Who said to whom...?" Instead of answering
right away, my students met my question with another question. "Why
do you sometimes say 'who' and sometimes 'whom'?" they asked.
Before insisting on an answer to my question, I took the time to
briefly explain the difference to them, and offered them a couple of
tips for figuring out which to use.
FRIEDMAN: When I came home from teaching that day, I
realized that it wasn't just grade five kids who get hung up on
pronoun cases. I've been asked by friends of mine-- fellow university
students-- which word to use in a given situation. So I decided to
set out once and for all, in podcast form, what is the deal-- and the
difference-- with subject and object pronouns.
FRIEDMAN: Before I get into the tips for how to use
them, I want to explain a little about the origins of pronouns with
different cases, and what they're good for. If you're only here for
the bottom line, then just sit tight, or skip ahead to the bit at the
end.
FRIEDMAN:
It was actually fairly difficult to find background on the history of
cased pronouns, because they're so old. My baseline assumption was
that they're the relic of the languages that helped form English.
Most of those languages have case distinctions-- that is, different
endings depending on what part of speech it is-- for almost all
nouns. There's no real "first appearance" when they've been
around longer than the language itself! I was, however, able to find
some information which confirmed my suspicions. According to Lessons
on the Noun Phrase in English
by Walter Hirtle (2009), cased pronouns are indeed originally from
the Proto-Indo-European that was the basis for most living languages
today, English included. In the original Proto-Indo-European, Hirtle
writes, there were actually eight
cases! This shrunk down to four in Old English: nominative (subject),
accusative (direct object), genitive (possessive), and dative
(indirect object) (p. 359).
FRIEDMAN:
Martha Kolln and Robert Funk's Understanding
English Grammar (2012),
continues on that theme. Understanding
English Grammar
is an excellent English grammar textbook, often used in
university-level grammar courses. It lists five noun cases from
Latin: our same four as in Old English, plus a fifth, ablative, for
the objects of prepositions (p. 290). What's more, they also manage
to give me a date to throw out there. As I suspected, one can't
really pinpoint an "earliest mention" for pronoun cases in
the English language. Still, Understanding
English Grammar
does mention that as early as 1762, grammar books mandated the use of
'whom' for the object versus 'who' for the subject in a sentence in
English (p. 141). Although they attribute this to similar grammar
rules in Latin (p. 141), I'm hesitant to accept this as the sole
explanation. After all, as Hirtle pointed out, pronoun cases were
also present in Old English, thanks to the Proto-Indo-European roots.
FRIEDMAN: But whether it's from Latin, or Old English,
or both, my suspicions are correct that pronoun cases in English are
something older than English itself, dating back to earlier languages
where the nouns, not just the pronouns, had to be conjugated, or
changed, to indicate case.
FRIEDMAN:
Okay, but with eight cases for all nouns in that Proto-Indo-European,
how do we get here?
Well, Hirtle points out a gradual reduction in noun cases over the
course of history, indicating a general tendency toward fewer
distinctions (Hirtle, 2009, p. 360). We already see this when we jump
from that eight to Latin's five or Old English's four. And these are
then reduced in English to two cases for nouns in general (the
regular form and the possessive, or genitive, form), and three for
pronouns-- subjective (nominative), objective (accusative), and
possessive (genitive). The
Cambridge Guide to English Usage (Peters,
2004) suggests that this trend is actually still continuing, and that
we may yet see a reduction in the distinctions between pronoun cases
in English (p. 95).
FRIEDMAN:
Because most people are comfortable with how and when to use
possessives, I'm going to set those aside for now. For today, I'm
going to focus on the distinctions between subject and object. We now
know where
they're from, but we still need to look into what they're actually
good for-- why
we have them-- before we're ready to get into the tips for how to use
them.
FRIEDMAN: We already have Kolln and Funk's somewhat
cynical explanation for pronoun cases in English: We have them
because Latin has them (Kolln and Funk, 2012, p. 141). Well, that's a
valid point, but I like to think that they're good for more than
that. Case distinctions actually make a lot of sense. They allow us
greater freedom with how we use language. With case distinctions, we
can rearrange our words in more ways while keeping the same meaning.
What do I mean? Well, take this sentence:
Sally loves Timmy.
If I reverse the nouns in there, I end up with:
Timmy loves Sally.
Which means a completely different thing, even if
Timmy's and Sally's love is mutual. But watch what happens when I
replace the names with pronouns, which have case distinctions:
She loves him.
If I rearrange the order of the words, I can have:
Him loves she.
It's an unusual word order, but it's still a perfectly
grammatical way of saying that Sally loves Timmy, not the other way
around. The case distinctions become even more useful with other
verbs. Take, for instance:
Suzie ate the chicken.
If I reverse the nouns, I end up with:
The chicken ate Suzie.
Poor Suzie! She got eaten by a chicken! And she could
have avoided it just by being a pronoun:
The chicken ate she.
Because 'she' is a subject pronoun, she's clearly the
one doing the eating, not the chicken. For the chicken to eat
Pronoun-Suzie, I'd have had to say:
The chicken ate her.
FRIEDMAN:
Okay, I can hear you saying, but what if we're not language
libertarians obsessed with putting all our sentences in weird orders
just because we can? What good are case distinctions then? Well, I'd
like to argue that it's always useful to be able to rearrange word
order, not just because you can. You can emphasize a word by putting
it earlier or later in the sentence. For example, maybe you want to
emphasize that him,
Sally loves, as opposed to me, whom she does not love. You might also
start off saying one word or phrase, and then decide you want to turn
it into a full sentence. "What did she eat?" "The
chicken... ate she." Plus, of course, if you're a poet, it's
always useful to be able to rearrange the words to find something
that rhymes, or that better fits the metre.
FRIEDMAN:
Even when your word order is perfectly normal, case distinctions can
clear up a lot of ambiguity about who's doing what in the sentence.
They give you that extra bit of information, and knowing more things
is always better. In fact, The
Cambridge
Guide to English Usage
(2004) mentions that some Aboriginal languages use even more cases,
ones that don't exist in English. They even have one "expressing
the lack of something" (p. 95)!
FRIEDMAN:
Right, okay, we're convinced on why
we want them, but what exactly is it that you've convinced us to
want? Subject and object pronouns are, respectively, pronouns that
take the subject or object position in a sentence. In order to count
as sentences, all sentences have verbs. A subject is the noun that's
doing
the verb in the sentence. If the object is a direct object, it's the
thing the verb is happening to.
If it's an indirect object, it's the thing that the verb's happening
at.
FRIEDMAN:
In English, our subject pronouns are: I, he, she, we, they, and who.
Our object pronouns are: me, him, her, us, them, and whom. I'm not
going to discuss it
or you,
because those both stay the same between the subjective and
objective. It wasn't always like this: you
used to have two forms-- thou and thee, respectively. More support
for the Case of the Disappearing Case Distinctions!
FRIEDMAN:
Before we go further, here's a tip for remembering which is which:
all but one of the object pronouns end in a consonant: him,
her,
us,
them,
whom.
In contrast, all the subject pronouns end in vowel sounds: I,
he,
she,
we,
they,
who.
The only exception to the consonant rule, me, still fits because its
counterpart, I, doesn't have any
consonants. Just like the object in a sentence can't be the one to
"do" the verb, the object pronouns are "closed off"
with their consonants. In contrast, the subjects are left wide open
to grab the verb. So, if it's closed by a consonant, it's an object.
If it's open with a vowel, it's a subject.
FRIEDMAN:
One of the biggest areas of pronoun confusion is what to do when the
pronoun's connected with an and
to another pronoun or noun. Grammar Girl, Mignon Fogarty, suggested a
quick and dirty tip for this in one of her books
(2011).
Her advice is to pretend the other word's not there (p. 64). If the
pronoun were the only word in that position in the sentence, which
would you use? Usually, this clears up the problem. Take, for
example, the following sentence:
She gave the book to Billy and I.
Or:
She gave the book to Billy and me.
It's very difficult to remember which one is correct.
But if we take Billy out of the sentence, it becomes clear that we
want to say:
She gave the book to me.
Not:
She gave the book to I.
Then we can put Billy back in, confident that we're
using the right pronoun. The same trick applies when we're dealing
with two pronouns. Take, for example:
Him and her are really good at what they do.
Or:
He and she are really good at what they do.
When we have the two pronouns together, they make each
other sound less wrong. So which one is the right one? We might have
to isolate them to figure it out. When we split it into two
sentences, we see that we want to say:
He is really good at what he does.
And:
She is really good at what she does.
Not:
Him is really good at what he does.
Or:
Her is really good at what she does.
When we isolate our pronouns, it becomes much clearer
which one is correct. Then it's the work of a moment to put them back
together and choose the right sentence.
FRIEDMAN: Another common point of confusion, one that
gets me all the time, is which pronoun goes after the "to be"
verb. I constantly have to remind myself that if I say "It's
me," I'm wrong. How does this make sense? We say:
It looked like him.
But:
It was he.
We say:
You killed her!
But:
You are she.
The
best explanation for this that I've seen was in Maxine Ruvinsky's
Practical
Grammar (2006).
Maxine Ruvinsky is a professor at Thompson Rivers University, with
degrees in communication and comparative literature. Ruvinsky
explains that the nature of the "be" verb means that the
sentence is "reversible" (p. 90). In any sentence where the
verb is "be", we can switch the nouns on either side of it
and still keep the exact same meaning. If you can reverse the word
order and keep the meaning, the second noun isn't really an object--
it's called a "complement" (p. 88) to the subject. That
makes it... another subject. Since I can say "I am it" and
mean the exact
same thing
as "It is I," I know that "It is I," not "It
is me," is correct. What's nice is that the explanation doubles
as a rule. If you can't remember that "to be" is different
from the other verbs like this, then you can use Ruvinsky's trick:
try to reverse the nouns in the sentence, with your pronoun in its
subject form. If it means the same thing, keep the subject pronoun.
If it doesn't mean the same thing, you have to use the object
pronoun.
FRIEDMAN: Since I based this whole podcast on a question
I got about "who" and "whom," it would be rather
silly if I didn't deal with it. This, though, is one of the easier
ones to figure out. First, we already have my tip from before, about
the pronouns in general: if it's closed with a consonant, it's an
object. If it's open with a vowel, it's a subject. We can reverse
that tip to tell us which word to use in a given situation: If you
want to use it like a subject-- the one doing the verb in the
sentence-- you use the one that's open with a vowel (who). If you
want to use it like an object-- the one that the verb is happening to
or at-- you use the one that's closed with a consonant (whom).
FRIEDMAN:
If you're not sure whether you want who-the-subject or
whom-the-object, Grammar Girl suggests in her book
to
try answering the question with a pronoun (Fogarty 2011, p. 116). If
the answer makes sense with he
or
they,
you know that you should use who.
If the answer makes more sense with him
or them,
you know that you should use whom.
FRIEDMAN: The last point I want to cover is
whoever-whomever. Take the following sentences:
Give the door prize to whomever you choose.
Or:
Give the door prize to whoever you choose.
And:
I will give the prize to whomever comes first.
Or:
I will give the prize to whoever comes first.
My
copyediting class spent at least two classes last semester trying to
explain why
it was correct to say "whomever" in the first sentence, but
"whoever" in the second. I found the most perfect
explanation of it in The
Elements of Style
by William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White (1979). The
Elements of Style is
the quintessential book on English grammar, and I am absolutely in
love with that book. Elements
of Style
explains: "When who
introduces
a subordinate clause, its case depends on its function in that
clause" (Strunk and White, p. 11). So in the first sentence, if
we isolate the clause, it's clear that we should say:
whomever you choose
because
you
is the one doing the choosing, and therefore the subject, in the
clause, making whom
the object. Whereas in the second sentence, isolating the clause, we
see that we should say:
whoever comes first
because
here, the verb "comes" is being done by whoever
(or who)--
who
is our subject. But, my class and I kept pointing out, the whoever
and whomever come right after a to.
And isn't the object of a preposition always in the object case?
Strunk and White come to our rescue again. "Whomever" or
"whoever" isn't the object of our preposition. The
Elements of Style
says that "the object of the preposition to
is the entire
clause"
(p. 11) [my emphasis]. So here's the tip: if you see a 'whoever' or
'whomever' coming after a preposition, use the "ever" as a
sign to "chop off" everything from that point on in your
sentence. That way, you can figure out who or whom based on just the
clause it's in. Then you can reattach it, safe in the knowledge that
the preposition can't hurt your who
when it's talking about the whole clause.
FRIEDMAN: This concludes my podcast on pronoun cases.
Thanks for listening to the first podcast of English And Such. This
is Becky Friedman, staunch grammarian, signing out.
FRIEDMAN: The music in this podcast is "Cool Intro"
by Kevin MacLeod. It is licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 3.0 and
is available at incompetech.com.
[MUSIC: Kevin MacLeod, "Cool Intro" (from
incompetech.com)]
References
Fogarty,
M. (2011). Grammar
Girl's 101 Misused Words You'll Never Confuse Again.
New York:
St. Martin's Griffin.
Hirtle,
W. H. (2009). Lessons
on the Noun Phrase in English: From Representation to Reference.
Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.
Kolln,
M. & Funk, R. (2012). Understanding
English Grammar: Ninth Edition.
New Jersey:
Pearson Education, Inc.
MacLeod,
K. (2008). Cool Intro. Location: incompetech.com. Licensed
under Creative
Commons: By Attribution 3.0. Retrieved from
Peters,
P. (2004). The
Cambridge Guide to English Usage.
Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Ruvinsky,
M. (2006). Practical
Grammar.
Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Strunk,
Jr., W., & White, E. B. (1979). The
Elements of Style: Third Edition.
New York:
Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.
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