Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

’Tis he, ’tis she, ’tis me, ’tis –
I don’t know who …
Cleft and identificational constructions
in 16th to 18th century English plays
Claudia Lange & Ursula Schaefer
Technische Universität Dresden
It is generally assumed that the construction It is me emerged in the 16th
century as the more colloquial alternative to It is I. In this paper, we focus on the
structure and distribution of two constructions featuring It is I/me, namely cleft
constructions (ClCs) and identificational copular clauses (IdCCs) in plays from
1600 to 1800. Surprisingly, it turns out that it is I or rather ‘tis I is the general
rule; the very limited occurrences of me in the relevant constructions are either
licensed by the syntactic context in ClCs or by referential conditions in IdCCs.
We further provide evidence for the assumption that IdCCs are historically
prior to ClCs, which in turn are not fully grammaticalized in the period under
discussion since they do not unambiguously display the biclausal structure which
is a defining property of clefts.
1. Introduction
The quotation in our title is from Holcroft’s 1785 translation of Beaumarchais’ 1784
Le Mariage de Figaro. In the French original the equivalent reads: “On se débat, c’est
vous, c’est lui, c’est moi, c’est toi, non, ce n’est pas nous; eh! mais qui donc?” Holcroft
does not directly translate Beaumarchais – as he rarely does – but mirrors the
rhythm suggested by c’est moi, c’est toi in the English rhyming series ’Tis he, ’tis she,
’tis me. His choice of pronoun forms – the first two English forms are in subject case
while the first person form is in object case – nicely illustrates an area of English
usage which has been fiercely contested by prescriptive grammarians ever since the
tradition came into existence, namely the ‘pronoun problem’: the choice between
subjective and objective case for personal pronouns in specific syntactic contexts.
Visser (1963: 241–243) provides an impressive array of comments on it is I/me,
starting with Ben Jonson in 1640 who simply states the Latin-derived rule that
the subject pronoun and the complement in a copular clause should receive the