Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 May 18

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May 18

It's I or It's me??

Nobody says "It's I" in everyday talk (except when referring to the phrase, of course.) We all say, "It's me." But a few (not many) sources say that although "It's me" is standard, "It's him/her/them" is not so widely accepted. Any experience anyone has with sources that talk about inconsistency on whether it's acceptable to use an object pronoun after is?? Georgia guy (talk) 01:28, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

It may be helpful to clarify concepts and to get terms right before proceeding. Putting aside commonness of use, "naturalness", etc, "It's I/me/he/him/she/her/they/them" are all grammatical. In this construction, "I/me/he/him/she/her/they/them" are clause complements, but they're not objects. (The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language calls them predicative complements.) Four of them ("I", etc) are nominative, four ("me", etc) are accusative. -- Hoary (talk) 01:57, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language deals with this on page 459, where it makes no distinction between (a) the choice between "I" and "me" in this construction, and (b) the choice between any other nominative/accusative pair (e.g. "he" and "him") in the same construction. It would be fairly easy to check for yourself in COCA; just remember to put a space before the apostrophe (thus COCA serves me 28 tokens of [case-insensitive] "it's I who" when I ask it for it 's i who). -- Hoary (talk) 02:14, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

Well, I think you'd have to say "It is I", without the contraction, if you're going to be that formal. Might affect your COCA results.

I always thought that was a hypercorrection, based on Latin grammar, but I don't really know. "It's me" might be influenced by French c'est moi, where "me" plays the role of the emphatic pronoun that moi plays in French. Thus also "it's him" for c'est lui. (Who is it? Me. Who did it? Him.) But again, just guessing. — kwami (talk) 08:50, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

"Who did it? — Him" is not acceptable (to me). "Who did it? — It wasn't me, it was him", however, is acceptable.  --Lambiam 20:39, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

Joseph Emonds argued in 1986 in Grammatically Deviant Prestige Constructions that English no longer has "subject" and "object" pronouns but rather a set of pronouns (the traditionally "subject" ones) which are used only in certain restricted syntactic contexts, and another set (the "object" ones) used everywhere else.

However there is a "prestige" version of English which can be propagated only by didactic teaching, because it calls on a property (grammatical case) which is no longer alive in English and difficult for people to learn unless they have knowledge of at least one language where it survives. This hypothesis also accounts for the prevalence of "hypercorrection". ColinFine (talk) 22:39, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

ColinFine, what are these "restricted syntactic contexts"?? I would guess this means a non-compound subject where the verb that it's the subject of is included and not simply "understood"; for example, "He is taller than I am" as opposed to "He is taller than I." (Other than, of course, "who"; which is now standard everywhere except after a preposition.) 22:54, 18 May 2023 (UTC)Georgia guy (talk)

The use of "I" in "between you and I" deviates from Emonds' basic rule but can hardly be considered prestigious.^[1]  --Lambiam 06:52, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

From whence does this Edmonds guy derive his authority? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:39, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from whence he got his PhD in linguistics in 1970: [2]. Wikipedia doesn't have an article on him, but he does seem to have many well-cited papers in the field of English Linguistics, many of which seem to be focused on grammar: [3]. --Jayron32 16:28, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

• The answer is it depends on whether one considers the use of "is" in this sentences as a copula (linking the second word to the first) or acting as a verb meaning "to exist as". A copula does not have an object, it has a Subject complement, which generally takes the nominative (subject) form. So "It is I" is fine. If you are using the form of "to be" to mean "to exists as", then it takes a normal object, and the object form "It is me" is also fine. The article and section Subject complement#Disputed pronoun forms notes that this dispute is quite old, and not fully resolved. Moral of the story: Do whatever you want; there's a grammatical rule that you can use to justify it either way. --Jayron32 16:23, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

"It's me" is standard? No. It is wrong, strictly speaking, non-standard: if it were otherwise, "me cringed", would be standard. Is "is" in "It is me" really used for "I exist as I"? No. But "It's me" is OK for a great number of people, so what?--Ralfdetlef (talk) 16:34, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

Where can we find more about this standard? Has it been published?  --Lambiam 18:31, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

Subject complement#Disputed pronoun forms and Oblique case#English and Existential clause is not as sure about this as you are. But it's good to know that your self-righteousness is enough to override all of the hundreds of trained grammarians, linguists, lexicographers, and other experts on English grammar. --Jayron32 16:54, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

This has been answered a couple of times now, But apparently not understood. I believe that this is because English speakers typically do not do formal grammar in English class. That is why "it is I" sounds wrong; in casual spoken English "it's me" is more common by a couple of orders of magnitude. "Is" in this case describes "it" but does not denote it as an object of the verb. For example in the sentence "he gave it to me" it is the direct object (described above as accusative) and "me" is the indirect object. That is not what "It's me" is doing. Nothing is happening to "me"; it simply is. But if the verb is anything other than "is" then "I" is wrong. For example "He has me" is intuitively correct, right? Also "he came with me"; "he has I" and "he came with I" are just silly, and that is because in those sentences "me" is a direct and indirect object respectively. And yes, this is because German has declensions. Hopefully restating it in a less technical manner will make it easier for monolinguals to understand. Elinruby (talk) 03:41, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

Who is the arbiter of what is right or wrong? English is not German, and what is true for German grammar may not hold for English grammar.  --Lambiam 17:48, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

Depends on the langage who is the arbiter. I am not interested enough in this question to source it, but there is no question that English is the product of a collision between Germanic and Romance languages, that German has declensions and that the reason "it is I" is correct and "it is me", however frequent its use in casual spoken English, is Simply Wrong is that the verb "to be" calls for the nominative and not the accusative. If you really want to nail this down I am sure it is fully explained in an apprendix to the OED for example. That is pretty much the level of source it would take to convince me that "it's me" is now considered correct in formal written English. But sure, it is much-used in casual speech, if that is your point. Elinruby (talk) 04:01, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

No, the point is the assignment of the label "Simply Wrong". Who is to decide that? The present indicative third person singular of English words takes an -s suffix, so someone could claim that "he can" is Simply Wrong because it should be "he cans", however much-used "he can" is by speakers who do not understand grammar. Anybody can say that something is Simply Wrong, and in fact there is no lack of self-proclaimed linguistic experts who are ready to proscribe certain common language uses. To label a use as wrong we need a more objective standard. For your information, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, writes this about the issue in its first chapter, Preliminaries:

It has been a common assumption of prescriptivists that only formal style is grammatically correct. ... The standard language embraces a range of styles, from formal through neutral to informal. A satisfactory grammar must describe them all. It is not that formal style keeps to the rules and informal style departs from them; rather, formal and informal styles have partially different rules. ... Confusing informality with ungrammaticality again, a strong prescriptivist tradition says that only [It is I] is grammatical. The accusative me is claimed to be the case of the direct object, as in It hurt me, but in [It is I v. It's me] the noun phrase after the verb is a predicative complement. In Latin, predicative complements take nominative, the same case as the subject. An assumption is being made that English grammar too requires nominative case for predicative complements. Use of the accusative me is regarded as a departure from the rules of grammar.
    The mistake here, of course, is to assume that what holds in Latin grammar has to hold for English. English grammar differs on innumerable points from Latin grammar; there is no reason in principle why the assignment of case to predicative complements should not be one of them. After all, English is very different from Latin with respect to case: the nominative–accusative contrast applies to only a handful of pronouns (rather than to the full class of nouns, as in Latin). The right way to describe the present situation in Standard English (unlike Latin) is that with the pronouns that have a nominative–accusative case distinction, the choice between the cases for a predicative complement noun phrase varies according to the style level: the nominative is noticeably formal, the accusative is more or less neutral and always used in informal contexts.

 --Lambiam 18:50, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

I was trying to explain it without using the terminology as the repeated questioning of it led me to believe that the wording of the answer was the source of some confusion. Certainly the The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language said it better than I did, sure; I did not learn about grammar in a class taught in English. However, your quote is a bit of a straw man as I have no clue about Latin. What I said was that English has DNA from both German and French. French does not have declensions, although some of its complicated rules about the dependencies of adjective spelling are similar. German does, but avoids the entire issue with "ich bin es". If your point is that "widely accepted in casual speech" means "is now correct in formal written English"... ok, fine. I disagree but fwiw on Wikipedia I would probably avoid the construction simply to avoid arguing this point ;) Elinruby (talk) 04:50, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

An argument does not become a straw man by dint of the recipient being clueless. Furthermore, it is easy to see that "It is I" is also Simply Wrong. Since the sentence states that the subject "is I", and "I" is the first person, the subject is the first person. So by subject-verb agreement (and inversion of "I am it"), the only grammatically Correct response is "It am I". :)  --Lambiam 05:50, 23 May 2023 (UTC)