Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang
Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang
Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang
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204 Claudia Lange & Ursula Schaefer<br />
nominative case. 1 It has also frequently been noted that Priestley stood out among<br />
<strong>the</strong> 18th–century prescriptivists (Leonard 1929: 186; Wolf 2005: 175) in advocating<br />
custom ra<strong>the</strong>r than strict adherence to artificial rules which were designed to graft<br />
<strong>the</strong> structure of Latin onto English. Consequently, Priestley’s stance on <strong>the</strong> vexed it is<br />
I/me-question is quoted in all discussions on <strong>the</strong> subject as evidence for actual usage<br />
in <strong>the</strong> 18th century (cf. Leonard 1929: 186; Visser 1963: 241 and Rissanen 1999: 261):<br />
All our grammarians say, that <strong>the</strong> nominative cases of pronouns ought to follow<br />
<strong>the</strong> verb substantive as well as precede it, and <strong>the</strong> example of some of our best<br />
writers would lead us to make a contrary rule; or at least, leave us at liberty to<br />
adopt which we liked best. (Priestley 1762: 47)<br />
In Present Day English (PDE), we encounter “a considerable amount of variation<br />
and instability within <strong>the</strong> [pronoun] system” (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 459),<br />
but <strong>the</strong> clear complementary distribution between I and me with I at <strong>the</strong> very formal<br />
side and me – and, for that matter him, her, us and <strong>the</strong>m – for ‘everyday usage’, is<br />
generally retained. As Quirk et al. put it:<br />
In <strong>the</strong> main, formal English follows <strong>the</strong> normative grammatical tradition which<br />
associates <strong>the</strong> subjective pronouns with <strong>the</strong> nominative case of pronouns in inflectional<br />
languages such as Latin, and <strong>the</strong> objective case with <strong>the</strong> oblique cases<br />
[in such languages]. (1985: 337)<br />
However, despite <strong>the</strong> sheer bulk of work that is dedicated to arguing for or against<br />
it is me, <strong>the</strong>re is precious little information on <strong>the</strong> actual origin of <strong>the</strong> construction.<br />
The received wisdom on <strong>the</strong> first appearance of it is me in English comes <strong>from</strong><br />
Visser, who states that<br />
In <strong>the</strong> last decade of <strong>the</strong> sixteenth century <strong>the</strong> construction […] appears for <strong>the</strong><br />
first time in print, [. . .] and remains in use in <strong>the</strong> subsequent periods with ever increasing<br />
frequency. [. . .] As to <strong>the</strong> stratum of diction to which this usage belongs<br />
(literary? colloquial? vulgar?) in <strong>the</strong> first centuries of its occurrence, it is difficult<br />
to form an opinion. (1963/73: 239)<br />
In <strong>the</strong> following, we will attempt to elucidate Visser’s observation. We will focus<br />
on <strong>the</strong> wavering between subject and object forms in two different constructions: in<br />
PDE, this personal pronoun alternation occurs in ‘identificational copular clauses’<br />
(IdCCs), as Ball (1991) calls <strong>the</strong> construction<br />
(1) it is I/me<br />
and which Hatcher (1948) called ‘formulas of identification’. Moreover, we find <strong>the</strong><br />
alternation in cleft constructions (ClCs) with a ‘specificational’ subject, such as:<br />
(2) it is I/me that should apologize<br />
1. Visser (1963/73: 241) incorrectly gives <strong>the</strong> date 1637 for Ben Jonson’s English Grammar.