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

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