Re: the case of the conjoined NP

Neeraj Mathur wrote:
"Colin Fine" <news@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:dqe8pp$p9$1$830fa7a5@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In the real grammar of English (as opposed to the artificial one that has been taught by generations of teachers since some misbegotten hack invented it in the 18th century), the 'subject' forms 'I', 'we' etc occur in only very limited circumstances - basically immediately before a verb in the same clause (it's more complicated than that actually, but that will do to start with).
They don't occur in other contects where a language with general case marking would require a nominative, such as within a conjunct NP. This is why English speaking children everywhere say 'Me and Sam went home' and the like, until parents or teachers demand that they say 'Sam and went home'. 

What are the other situations where the oblique forms are used as subjects?

Neeraj Mathur



No, I wasn't talking about the embedded clause constructs that Nathan is talking about. Emonds gives four or five other contexts where prescriptive grammar demands 'I', but (apparently because they are much less common than the conjoined subject construction) speakers and writers tend to be uncomfortable with either 'I' or 'me'.

Unfortunately I can't remember the examples, and I've no idea where I've put my copy of Emonds' paper. The point was that the pronoun was embedded in some sort of complex phrase that served as the subject NP. His proposed rule for English was that the subject forms were used only when the pronoun was the subject of a verb in the same domain (in some sense - I can't remember the technical details). A conjoined NP was a new domain for this purpose, and so were certain other structures - appositional phrases, perhaps? I wish I could remember.

I should perhaps say that the analysis wasn't ad hoc - it was using a current theory - X-bar or something.

Colin
.

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