More on Whomever

If you found this post on whoever vs. whomever interesting, you can find further discussion of whomever in this post from Arnold Zwicky at the new and improved Language Log site. He identifies the origin of the confusion over whomever as “an unexamined theoretical assumption about syntax” that is still taught in schools (at least, in those that actually teach grammar).

If He and She Is Right, Why Does It Sound So Weird?

When Doug’s teacher returns a graded paper to him, he rolls it up into a tight cylinder. He does this so that he can poke it into his almost-but-not-quite zipped up backpack without having to take the backpack off its hook. After lunch he unzips the backpack enough to stuff his lunchbox into it. He leaves the backpack half unzipped after this, which allows him to shove in any later-arriving papers without having to roll them up. I have assembled this picture from regularly emptying his backpack of one or two randomly wrinkled papers, then his lunchbox, and finally, one by one, any rolled-then-flattened papers hiding underneath it. Once I’ve thown the lunchbox back on top of the fridge, it’s time to unfurl the papers and look at them. The last one I looked at yesterday was a language arts paper. Doug had had to identify a few sentences as declarative, interrogative, etc., label nouns as singular or plural, and correct some sentences. One of the sentences to be corrected was:

him and her take ice skating lessons on wednesday

Doug’s answer:

Whomever Is Never Actually Right

My wife and I watched this week’s episode of The Office last night, which featured the following scene (20:55 into the online version, accessible here):

Ryan: What I really want, honestly Michael, is for you to know it, so that you can communicate it to the people here, to your clients, to whomever.
Michael: [chuckle] OK.
Ryan: What?
Michael: It’s whoever, not whomever.
Ryan: No, it’s whomever.
Michael: No, whomever is never actually right.

What’s Mine and Yours

I was cleaning off the desktop today and came across a piece of paper that had gotten buried a few weeks ago. On it I’d written something I heard Morgan Spurlock (of Supersize Me fame) say during an interview on the Today show on May 23:

These people don’t have mine and yours best interest in mind.

His comment reminded me of the last linguistics class I taught. It was an introductory class, and when we got to syntax, I had decided to have the students do some actual syntax research instead of just learning about categories, constituents, and tree diagrams. I would put them in pairs, and give them a research question that they could generate their own data for by talking with each other. Then they could look at their data, see what kind of patterns they found, and summarize them in a descriptive rule. Yeah, that was the ticket, man! Learning by doing! They’d get a taste of the mysteries that lay just around corners of the language they’d never looked at closely. They’d experience the thrill of discovery when they detected rules they’d never heard form an English teacher but that they’d been following all their lives. Yep, that’s how the best teachers do it.

One of the research questions was what happened when you tried to coordinate various possessive determiners: his, her, my, your, our, their, its. Were all combinations OK? Just some? None? If they were ungrammatical, could they be fixed? I figured the data generation should be pretty easy: Just pick two from the list, put an and between them, and see how it sounds when you put a noun after the coordinated possessives.

I was explaining the procedure to the pair of students who had this question. “So what if you have, like, a car, and it also belongs to your husband. Can you say, ‘my and your car’?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” one of them told me. “I’d say ‘our car.’”

D’oh! She was right, of course. How could I give a context that wouldn’t allow her to take this easy way out? A context that would force her to tackle the my and your question head on?

“OK, suppose you’re having an argument with your husband, and you want to remind him that it’s not just his car, it’s yours, too. Could you say, ‘It’s not your car; it’s my and your car’?”

“I’d still say ‘our car.’”

This wasn’t working out the way I wanted. Meanwhile, the students with the question about coordinated wh words were calling me. So were the students who were working with too big a vs. too big of a.

“OK,” I said, “But suppose you want to emphasize that our includes you. Could you say, ‘It’s our car. That means it’s my and your car, not just your car’?” After that, the students were able to generate some data, and did pretty well if I recall. Don’t know if any thrill-of-discovery experiencing occurred, though.

Anyway, the reason that research question was even on the list was that one day I’d tried to coordinate my and your (yes, in a naturally occurring conversation) and realized that even though it seemed like it should be OK, it wasn’t. For me, the pattern was like this:

• *my and your car
• *your and my car
• ?mine and your car
• yours and my car

Why should I have to use the possessive pronouns (mine, yours) for the first coordinate instead of the determiners (my, your)? I didn’t know, but it was true.

And now we come back to Morgan Spurlock. Apparently my and your is no good for him, either. His alternative was to use pronouns for both coordinates, not just the for the first one like I do. Was mine and yours an example of the coordinated-possessives rule in his grammar? If so, I haven’t (knowingly) come across other speakers who have the same rule. Or was it an error, not generated by his grammar at all, but just produced in the split second when he realized my and your wasn’t going to work and couldn’t quite access the Plan B for this kind of situation in time?

Stupid Me

Here’s something from a Carolyn Hax column that appeared in October 2002:

I gave brief explanation of an old bad, evil boyfriend who blindsided my by dumping me after two years and then showed up the next morning… and begged me to take him back and stupid me did, and it still ended badly….

“Stupid me did”? Ewww. But on the other hand, *Stupid I did is even worse. Looks like there was a conflict between (1) having the nominative I for a subject and (2) having accusative me in order to be able to modify it with stupid. In a case like this, I think most speakers would bypass the issue and say something like, “Stupidly, I did,” or “Like a fool, I did.” But this speaker boldly faced the challenge, made her choice, and chose in favor of constraint (2).

If I’d had a blog when this column came out, I’d have written about it, but instead the clipping has been stashed in a folder with other linguistically interesting newspaper clippings for two years. What inspired me to bring it out now? This post by Arnold Zwicky at Language Log. It’s an interesting analysis of the following quotation from author Seth Kanter:

People are used to these stories of Alaska that are romantic and beautiful, and flowing wilderness, and here comes me with, y’know, an assault rifle and a jug of R&R.

Zwicky’s analysis is well written and fun to read, and as an aside, he applies it to other cases of accusative subjects and third-person verb morphology in English:

[O]nce we have accusative subjects, the third-person singular verb form comes in here comes me is just what we’d expect. English verbs in finite clauses agree with nominative subjects, but default to third-person singular otherwise; this sort of defaulting is very well known in other languages, and can be seen elsewhere in English (either it’s Poor me is going to suffer for this or you can’t say it at all; but certainly *Poor me am going to suffer for this is just out, as, for that matter, is *Poor I am going to suffer for this).

The only question left is why *Poor I is no good in the first place. It just isn’t, I guess.