I, me, and overcorrection
The Vancouver Olympics are over now. The Anthem of the Vancouver Olympics (lyrics here) has the repeated lines:
I believe together we’ll fly
I believe in the power of you and I
Note that last line - I believe in the power of you and I. Shouldn't it be "... you and me."? Well, yes. Among those who care about such things, this has been critized as wrong (You can Google "I believe in the power of you and I" - with the quotes).
Some say that the rhyme with "fly" necessitates the error, that the artistic trumps correctness. But that doesn't really answer the question. The lyricist obviously thought this was, if not correct, close enough to correct that he could get away with using it.
Grammactically, this is called "overcorrection", when a correct grammatical form is changed to an incorrect form because it is related closely to a form which is often used incorrectly, and a change to the incorrect form to the correct form is overapplied to cases where the "correction" is incorrect (is that sentence complicated ehough?). In English "I" and "me", by the usual version of "proper grammar", are often misused. "Me and Joe went to the store", for instance, instead of the "correct" "Joe and I went to the store". This sets up in the mind a tendency to feel that "me" is used too often and "I" not enough, and this tendency displays itself in changing "me" to "I" inappropriately - "Mary gave the food to Joe and me" becomes ""Mary gave the food to Joe and I", for instance, and, as in the song, "the power of you and me" becomes "the power of you and I".
What seems to be happening is that in English, the primary form is the objective, and it gets changed by the brain, more or less at the last minute, to the nominative form. The brain forms the original sentence along the lines of "me go to the store" and, after the sentence has been formed but before it has been uttered, changes the "me" to "I".
Several things lead to this conclusion. First, something along this line has already happened in English. In the King James Bible of 1611, for example, the nominative case of "you" was "ye" ("ye" and "you" were only plural, the singular forms were then "thou" and "thee"). Note that it is the nominative form that disappeared, being taken over by the objective form. This suggests that the objective form is somewhat "stonger" or "more basic" in English than the nominative form.
Another thing that suggests this is what we might call "Tarzan English". Note it is "Me Tarzan", and not "I Tarzan", and "Me want .. " not "I want ...". However, we would not see in such "Tarzan" English "Give I ..."; it would still be "Give me ...". Similarly, it would be "Him Cheetah" rather than "He Cheetah", and "Give him ..." rather than "give he ...", and "Her Jane" rather than "She Jane".
This suggest that the objective forms ("me", "him", "her", "us", "them") are somehow "more basic" or "more fundamental" than the nominative forms, and these more basic forms are somehow corrected to the nominative forms later in the speech generating process. ("you" and "it" are the same in the nominative and objective cases, so the final result it the same: "You Jane")
What seems to, in normal informal English, the transformation of "me" to "I" is the presences of the pronoun alone in the normal pre-verb position. We do not normally see the use of "me" as the subject pronoun when it is alone: "Me will go to the store" is almost never seen in native English speakers, it is always "I will go to the store." However, the proceedure that changes the "me" to "I" seems to be sometimes "fooled" with nore complex subjects - will will see "Me and Joe will go to the store", or "Joe and me will go to the store". In this case is appears that the subject, being "Me and Joe", or "Joe and me" somehow doesn't trigger the rule "change 'me' to 'I' when it is a subject of a verb". This seems to be because the brain has already "clumped" the complex subject together into a single unit; it is no longer "Joe" and "me", but rather the single unit "Joe-and-me". The nominative-case-changing-rule in the brain, notices that "Joe-and-me" isn't "me", and thus doesn't make the change.
Of course, we have been taught since infancy that it should be "Joe and I"; but it seems, in English at least, this is a relatively difficult change to make. Probably this difficulty arises at least in part from the fact that nouns don't make any change, and two of the personal pronouns, "you" and "it", also don't change. So the English speaking brain does not have a broad, general "change-to-nominative-case-rule" based broadly on grammatical but rather a more limited "change-(some)-pronouns-to-nominative-case-rule" based more of the postion of the pronoun raltive to the verb which make it much easier to miss these pronouns when they have already been lumped together into a nounlike phrase that will become the subject.
So, back to overcorrection. Our Enlish-speaking brains have difficulty "seeing" the embedded pronouns in a nounlike phrase, so somehow the rule, or more likely a separate rule, gets set up along the lines of "in cases of complex subject containing "me", change the "me" to "I". Since we don't have in English a general subject/object change in nouns, the link to the grammatical function of the nounlike phrase is hard to see, to the rule gets applies too generally, and we see things like "the power of you and I" .
I do need to note an exception to this general rule that the objective is more basic than he nominative, and that is the word "who". "Who", the nominative form with the objective form "whom", seems to be the more basic form, increasing driving out the objective form; "whom" seems in many cases to be somewhat pedantic. The difference seems to be the use of the word, is is more frequently uses in the nominative case ("Who went?") that the objective ("whom did you say ...?) Also, note the apparent "trigger" to the rule to generate the nominative case above; it seems to be something along the lines of "stands alone before a verb". Since he grammar of "who"/"whom" is different from that of the other pronouns, "whom" frequently stands directly before a verb: "Whom did you say ..."). Further complicated by "you" and "it, which do not change form between nominative and objective usage, and thus prbobly weaken the overal strength of the rules that would make the change. All of which combine to produce "who" rather that "whom" as the basic form, with a rule to change "who" to "whom" unlike the other pronouns.
I believe together we’ll fly
I believe in the power of you and I
Note that last line - I believe in the power of you and I. Shouldn't it be "... you and me."? Well, yes. Among those who care about such things, this has been critized as wrong (You can Google "I believe in the power of you and I" - with the quotes).
Some say that the rhyme with "fly" necessitates the error, that the artistic trumps correctness. But that doesn't really answer the question. The lyricist obviously thought this was, if not correct, close enough to correct that he could get away with using it.
Grammactically, this is called "overcorrection", when a correct grammatical form is changed to an incorrect form because it is related closely to a form which is often used incorrectly, and a change to the incorrect form to the correct form is overapplied to cases where the "correction" is incorrect (is that sentence complicated ehough?). In English "I" and "me", by the usual version of "proper grammar", are often misused. "Me and Joe went to the store", for instance, instead of the "correct" "Joe and I went to the store". This sets up in the mind a tendency to feel that "me" is used too often and "I" not enough, and this tendency displays itself in changing "me" to "I" inappropriately - "Mary gave the food to Joe and me" becomes ""Mary gave the food to Joe and I", for instance, and, as in the song, "the power of you and me" becomes "the power of you and I".
What seems to be happening is that in English, the primary form is the objective, and it gets changed by the brain, more or less at the last minute, to the nominative form. The brain forms the original sentence along the lines of "me go to the store" and, after the sentence has been formed but before it has been uttered, changes the "me" to "I".
Several things lead to this conclusion. First, something along this line has already happened in English. In the King James Bible of 1611, for example, the nominative case of "you" was "ye" ("ye" and "you" were only plural, the singular forms were then "thou" and "thee"). Note that it is the nominative form that disappeared, being taken over by the objective form. This suggests that the objective form is somewhat "stonger" or "more basic" in English than the nominative form.
Another thing that suggests this is what we might call "Tarzan English". Note it is "Me Tarzan", and not "I Tarzan", and "Me want .. " not "I want ...". However, we would not see in such "Tarzan" English "Give I ..."; it would still be "Give me ...". Similarly, it would be "Him Cheetah" rather than "He Cheetah", and "Give him ..." rather than "give he ...", and "Her Jane" rather than "She Jane".
This suggest that the objective forms ("me", "him", "her", "us", "them") are somehow "more basic" or "more fundamental" than the nominative forms, and these more basic forms are somehow corrected to the nominative forms later in the speech generating process. ("you" and "it" are the same in the nominative and objective cases, so the final result it the same: "You Jane")
What seems to, in normal informal English, the transformation of "me" to "I" is the presences of the pronoun alone in the normal pre-verb position. We do not normally see the use of "me" as the subject pronoun when it is alone: "Me will go to the store" is almost never seen in native English speakers, it is always "I will go to the store." However, the proceedure that changes the "me" to "I" seems to be sometimes "fooled" with nore complex subjects - will will see "Me and Joe will go to the store", or "Joe and me will go to the store". In this case is appears that the subject, being "Me and Joe", or "Joe and me" somehow doesn't trigger the rule "change 'me' to 'I' when it is a subject of a verb". This seems to be because the brain has already "clumped" the complex subject together into a single unit; it is no longer "Joe" and "me", but rather the single unit "Joe-and-me". The nominative-case-changing-rule in the brain, notices that "Joe-and-me" isn't "me", and thus doesn't make the change.
Of course, we have been taught since infancy that it should be "Joe and I"; but it seems, in English at least, this is a relatively difficult change to make. Probably this difficulty arises at least in part from the fact that nouns don't make any change, and two of the personal pronouns, "you" and "it", also don't change. So the English speaking brain does not have a broad, general "change-to-nominative-case-rule" based broadly on grammatical but rather a more limited "change-(some)-pronouns-to-nominative-case-rule" based more of the postion of the pronoun raltive to the verb which make it much easier to miss these pronouns when they have already been lumped together into a nounlike phrase that will become the subject.
So, back to overcorrection. Our Enlish-speaking brains have difficulty "seeing" the embedded pronouns in a nounlike phrase, so somehow the rule, or more likely a separate rule, gets set up along the lines of "in cases of complex subject containing "me", change the "me" to "I". Since we don't have in English a general subject/object change in nouns, the link to the grammatical function of the nounlike phrase is hard to see, to the rule gets applies too generally, and we see things like "the power of you and I" .
I do need to note an exception to this general rule that the objective is more basic than he nominative, and that is the word "who". "Who", the nominative form with the objective form "whom", seems to be the more basic form, increasing driving out the objective form; "whom" seems in many cases to be somewhat pedantic. The difference seems to be the use of the word, is is more frequently uses in the nominative case ("Who went?") that the objective ("whom did you say ...?) Also, note the apparent "trigger" to the rule to generate the nominative case above; it seems to be something along the lines of "stands alone before a verb". Since he grammar of "who"/"whom" is different from that of the other pronouns, "whom" frequently stands directly before a verb: "Whom did you say ..."). Further complicated by "you" and "it, which do not change form between nominative and objective usage, and thus prbobly weaken the overal strength of the rules that would make the change. All of which combine to produce "who" rather that "whom" as the basic form, with a rule to change "who" to "whom" unlike the other pronouns.
Labels: grammar
posted by decaf owl at 12:05 PM
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