Such disagreements often are surprisingly impassioned. Sometimes, one side attempts to argue on the basis of logic or functionality that a particular usage is better. At other times, people appeal to precedent: a particular usage should be used because the best writers have used it in the past. In some cases, people will even appeal to writers who wrote several centuries ago, such as William Shakespeare. Such appeals to old usage are of dubious value, since many grammatical constructions used by Shakespeare could not possibly be used in educated writing today, as in the use of "his" for "its", or "an" for "if". We do not hold such usages against Shakespeare, since they were normal in his day and the language has changed since then.
Writing about usage tends to be most useful to other people if it makes clear what kind of impression a particular usage will make on particular kinds of readers. Some usages will strike some readers as "barbaric" and indicative of a low level of education. Other usages pose the opposite risk, that they will strike some readers as pretentious. Ideally, good advice will help a writer to best adapt his or her writing to the intended audience. Unfortunately, there are also cases where no single usage will keep all readers contented: one choice will sound vulgar to some of the readers, and the opposite choice will sound pretentious to a different set of readers. For an example, see the discussion of usage in the Wikipedia article tempo.
| Table of contents |
|
2 Object and Subject in Prepositional Phrases 3 It's I/It's me 4 Between you and I 5 See also |
Rules against the split infinitive are often claimed to be a holdover from grammarians attempting to make English more like Latin, in which split infinitives are impossible. An example is from the introduction to the Star Trek TV series, in which it is claimed that the characters' duty is "to boldly go where no man has gone before". To go is an infinitive, split by the word boldly. Those who do not recognize this rule often point to this example, since the alternatives (boldly to go or to go boldly) destroy the flow and rhythm of the sentence.
Sentences containing a prepositional phrase like to Joe and me are often reflexively changed to to Joe and I out of a belief that this is always correct. The use of subject pronouns (e.g. I, he) in prepositional goes back several centuries, but it is not correct. However, see the section Between you and I below.
The correct usage is the same form of the first person singular pronoun as would be used without the other noun. For example, Lucy gave a dollar to Joe and me is correct because Lucy gave a dollar to me is clearly correct, as opposed to Lucy gave a dollar to I.
There's no way to go wrong on this because they're both right. We're approaching the end of a period of transition from one rule to the other. The second is more common, but the first is correct also.
The I in "It's I" is a subject complement. Subject complements are used only with a class of verbs called linking verbs, of which to be is the most common. Unlike object complements, subject complements are not affected by the action of the verb, and they describe or explain the subject. In this case, I is not affected by the action of the verb is, and it specifies exactly who the subject It is. The subject complement therefore takes the subjective case. Usually, this makes no difference in the sentence because English nouns no longer distinguish between subjective and objective case. But English pronouns make the distinction, and the subject complement takes I instead of me. It's I is funny sounding, but perfectly correct.
However, the subject complement rule is the most recent casualty of the simplification process that English has been undergoing for centuries. The rule makes English more complicated by requiring us to distinguish between two types of complements and using different forms of the pronoun. But this complication adds nothing to communication, as evidenced by the fact that the same form of the noun is used in both types of complement, without harm to understanding. English speakers have discovered that they can dispense with the subject complement rule, and they're gradually doing so.
At this point, the use of the subjective in the subject complement has almost entirely disappeared. Both rules are still current, but the use of subjective in the subject complement is much less common.
An example of this phrase occurs in Shakespeare;
A comparison that sheds further light on the phenomenon is the following:
Split infinitives
Object and Subject in Prepositional Phrases
It's I/It's me
Between you and I
It was also used by the Restoration playwrights. This phrase was acceptable in Tudor and Restoration England, but today, most educated people, including the authors of style manuals, would consider it ungrammatical. The principle that is cited is that prepositions always take object pronouns, and it does not matter whether the pronouns occur singly or are joined with a conjunction.
Here, the subjective case sounds clearly wrong to most writers, and is almost never used in current written English. The example suggests that "between you and I" is in fact an idiom; it has been used so frequently for so many centuries that it tends to sound fairly acceptable in comparison to "between you and we". Indeed, "between you and I", though avoided in writing, would be considered acceptable in oral use by many educated speakers.