<!>Is English in the early stages of losing pronoun case and verb concordance? (2014-09-19 13:50:48)
Is English in the early stages of losing pronoun case and verb concordance?
Anthologica Universe Atlas / Forums / Terra Firma / Is English in the early stages of losing pronoun case and verb concordance? / <!>Is English in the early stages of losing pronoun case and verb concordance? (2014-09-19 13:50:48)

? thelettermu posts: 262
, Groovy Cat message
quoting dhok, Deacon, Norman, United States:
Consider the following two sentences I've found as Reddit post titles.

Me [26 M] caught my girlfriend [21 F] of 3 months with another guy a couple weeks ago.

Me [19 M] just ended a friendship [18 F] due to feelings of affection.

Somehow, only the 1s object pronoun seems natural here- "him" or "us" would sound a little odder- and then only when there's something causing a hiatus between the subject and the verb.

I've also heard "[subject noun] and [subject noun] (verb with a 3s marker)" a lot. I can't find any text examples right now, but only because I don't know how to Google the construction; it's certainly very common in speech.

There's also the infamous "Me and him went to the store", which is the default construction for everyone but pedants by now.

Finally, Yatalac has informed me that there is a rule in some northern English and Scottish dialects that all present-tense verbs take the 3s marker unless they are immediately preceded by a non-3s pronoun. Apparently this has been around for a while and is on the decrease due to standardization. I don't know whether it has anything to do with the behavior of American English, though.

Maybe it is like in French, where the 1sg nominative is “je”, but when it appears on its own, it has to be “moi”?