Precept vs. Usage: Pronominal Case Forms in Late Modern English

Abstract

The English pronominal system has been the matter of heated debate among grammarians for the last 300 years. This is especially the case of the dichotomy nominative-objective pronoun forms I/me, he/him, she/her, we/us, and they/them in a set of linguistic contexts. In Present-day English, the phenomenon does not appear to be a matter of correct vs. incorrect language, but one of formal vs. informal language, although a different state of affairs is found in earlier periods of English. Since the eighteenth century, a great concern for language correctness grew, resulting in an upsurge in the publication of grammars as an attempt to regularize the language and ‘enforce a uniformity and conformity to some absolute standard’ (Drake 1977: 1). Usage books, however, reveal a lack of consensus among grammarians on the ‘correct’ use of pronouns, and a look at the evidence demonstrates significant variation on their usage during the late modern period. The present paper aims to investigate the correlation between prescriptivist norms and actual usage as regards English pronominal forms over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Precepts are studied in view of prescriptive commentary in grammars, whereas quantitative data is retrieved from CLMET3.1 (The corpus of Late Modern English Texts). The purpose of the present article is therefore twofold: a) to analyze the historical distribution of pronoun case forms in postverbal position in the period 1710–1920 and b) to evaluate the influence that prescriptive rules may have had upon their actual usage over time. Case variation is thus explored in three different linguistic environments, including the use of pronouns after the linking verb be (e.g. ‘it is I/me’) and after the conjunctions than (e.g. ‘she is taller than I/me’) and as (e.g. ‘she is as tall as I/me’).