He (or Possibly Him?) as Head

A commenter on a newspaper article about Prince Charles (the opinionated royal destined to inherit the throne under Britain’s hereditary monarchical and theocratic system of government) said this:

“With he at its head?” Not “with him at its head”? Let’s face it: The traditionally accepted rules for case-marking pronouns in Standard English are simply a mystery to many people who in general are counted as literate as well as conversationally competent.

Of course, such speakers have a better grasp of English grammar than Tarzan did: They know enough to control cases of single pronouns as subjects or objects of tensed verbs, so they say I love you rather than *Me love you, and Don’t hurt me rather than *Don’t hurt I. But once other contexts come into play, they simply do not know what to do. They may settle for nominative when in doubt, since most people recall being told something about using he in preference to him (saying I am taller than he or some such pompous nonsense). But in this domain (shocking though it is for a linguist to say this) they don’t really seem to behave as if they know what the rules of their own language are. They vacillate, and their behavior doesn’t always agree with other speakers.

In the case at hand, the issue is what case to assign to a pronoun that is the subject of a verbless clausal complement of with. In a sentence like Even with ISIL at the door, Baghdad mansions are going for US$1m (the headline on this web page), the words ISIL at the door constitute a clause with no verb: It has a preposition phrase as its predicate instead of a verb phrase, and ISIL is the subject. Now, it is clearly a rule that a pronoun subject in a finite clause should be nominative (as in I love you), but that doesn’t tell you anything about a pronoun subject in a verbless clause: It doesn’t decide between even with they at the door and even with them at the door.

And (as is well known) once coordination rears its ugly head, all bets are off regarding what English speakers will say. Dialectal and idiolectal variation is rife. I have heard utterances parallel to all four of these:

1. She and I were at school together.
2. She and me were at school together.
3. Her and I were at school together.
4. Her and me were at school together.

I don’t even bother to mark any of these with the asterisk signal of ungrammaticality; the situation is too complex to make this sensible. In the domain of English pronoun case choice there are dialect distinctions, personal idiosyncrasies, style differences, straightforward on-the-fly speech errors, and hypercorrections (trying so hard to be right that you go wrong). It is fairly clear, for example, that many educated speakers use a dialect of Standard English in which the rule is that a pronoun following the coordinator and should be nominative (hence for my wife and I, etc.).

Many pompous twits deem people ignorant if they occasionally get a pronoun case form “wrong” (as judged by the traditional Standard English rules). I hope such twits know that between you and I occurs in Shakespeare (Merchant of Venice III.2; there are similar locutions in other Shakespeare plays). I also hope they will have the grace to admire the Australian aborigines for their intellectual aptitude, because in several of the Pama-Nyungan languages of aboriginal Australia, two separate systems are maintained: pronouns are marked with case according to the nominative/accusative system that English exhibits (intransitive subjects marked the same way as transitive subjects but direct objects inflected differently), but the other noun phrases are inflected according to the ergative/absolutive system (transitive subjects specially marked, but intransitive subjects bearing the same inflection as direct objects). And fieldworkers report that the speakers are quite systematic about it (case is rather more important in Pama-Nyungan languages than it is in English, where case is a vestigial remnant of an earlier system mostly lost).

I suspect, however, that there are probably people who maintain that the use of a nonstandard pattern like Her and I were at school together signals lack of intelligence (it doesn’t) while also believing that Australian aboriginal languages are primitive gabble with no fixed grammatical rules (they aren’t).

Thanks to Bob Ladd for bringing to my attention the remark that I discuss here. And by the way, my own usage would be with him at its head, and for my wife and me, and She and I were at school together. But your mileage may differ.