A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

Plain case

§8.3 Inflection 107

In Present-day English the contrast between nominative and accusative fonns is found
only with personal pronouns and with interrogative and relative who (discussed in
Ch. 9, §2.4, Ch. 11, §3). Other nouns appear in the same fonn in all the above con­
structions: cf. The minister wrote the editorial, Kim met the minister in Pa ris, and so
on. We use the tenn plain fonn here: to say that minister was nominative in the
first and accusative in the second would be to make the mistake of confusing
INFLECTIONAL CASE with GRAMMATICAL FUNCTION.

Case in coordinations

For many speakers the above rules extend to constructions where the pronoun is
coordinated, but there are also many who use special rules for coordinative con­
structions. Note the status markers on the following examples:

[5 7 ] a. Kim and 1 went over there.

ii a. They invited Sandy and me.

b. !Kim and me went over there.

b. %They invited Sandy and l.

The whole coordination is subject in [i] and object in [ii], so in the absence of coor­
dination we would have nominative I in [i] (I went over there) and accusative me in
[ii] (They invited me). Construction rib] is not accepted as Standard English, though
it is very common in non-standard speech. Construction [iib], however, is used by
many highly educated people with social prestige in the community; it should be
regarded as a variant Standard English fonn.

Prescriptive grammar note

The pattern in [iib] is heard constantly in the conversation of people whose status as

speakers of Standard English is clear, but it is nevertheless condemned as incorrect or

illiterate by many usage manuals. For this reason it is not so common in print: editors will

often 'correct' it. Nonetheless, examples are certainly found. Those who condemn it sim­

ply assume that the case of a pronoun in a coordination must be the same as when it stands

alone. Actual usage is in conflict with this assumption. (Note that we have already come

across another instance of coordinated NPs differing in form from non-coordinated ones:

recall the discussion of husband and wife in [15iia].)

Genitive case

While the nominative-accusative contrast is found only with a handful of pronouns,
genitive case applies to nouns quite generally - and hence is discussed in a separate
section below (§9). The distinction between dependent and independent forms of
the genitive, however, is restricted to personal pronouns. Compare:

[58] DEPENDENT FORM

a. I've lost lID'. key.

ii a. He objected to lID'. taking notes.

INDEPENDENT FORM

b. This is mine.

b. Yo ur proposal is better than mine.