A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

§4.1 Syntactic differences between predicative complements and objects 75

position. A PC can have the form of a bare role NP, but an 0 can't:

[22] PC

a. She became the treasurer.

II a. She became treasurer.

b.

b.

She

*She

o

knew the treasurer.

knew treasurer.

In [i] both the [a] and [b] examples are fine because an ordinary NP like the treas­

urer can be either a PC or an O.

In [ii], treasurer is a bare role NP, so it is permitted with become, which takes a

PC, but not with know, which takes an object.

(c) PC does not correspond to the subject of a passive clause

We noted earlier that a typical object in an active clause corresponds to the subject
of the passive clause that has the same meaning. A PC shows no such relationship:

[23] ACTIVE

a. Ed insulted a friend of mine.

ii a. Ed became a friend of mine.

PASSIVE

b. A friend of mine was insulted by Ed.

b. *A friend of mine was become by Ed.

• In [ia] afriend of mine is a direct object, and accordingly can be subject in a pas­
  sive clause with the same meaning, [ib].


• But in [iia], a friend of mine is a PC, and so there is no corresponding passive, as
  evident from the ungrammaticality of [iib].

(d) PC can have the form of a nominative pronoun

There is a rather formal style of English in which the pronouns listed in [7] can
appear in the nominative case when functioning as PC, while objects allow only
accusative case:

[24] PC o

a. It I was I he I who said it. b. They accused Illim. I of lying. I

The point here is not that nominative case is required on pronouns in PC function.
Some older prescriptive grammars say that, but it is not true. A question like Who's
there? is normally answered It's me; it sounds very stiff and formal to say It is I. Many
speakers of Standard English would say It was him who said it rather than [24a]. So
NPs in PC function can be accusative pronouns. What separates PC from^0 , however,
is that no matter whether you use nominative or accusative case on PC pronouns,
nominative case is absolutely impossible for^0 pronouns. No native speaker, even in
the most formal style, says They accused I of saying it, or Please let I in?

3 We are concerned here with clauses where the pronoun constitutes the whole of the object: when there

is coordination within the object some speakers do have nominatives, as in 'kThey invited Kim and I

to lunch (see Ch. 5, §8.3).