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

216 Claudia Lange & Ursula Schaefer
Although we are still a far cry from really being able to generalize, our last examples
point towards what might, on further scrutiny, turn out as a complementary
pattern: both characters use me as predicate when the subject is referential, i.e.,
not empty, but the subject form in that position when the subject is it, that is, in a
‘proper’ IdCC. That or this in the examples from Shakespeare and Aphra Behn are
semantically filled by explicit recourse to an immediately preceding noun phrase
(a foolish knight (Shakespeare), my Love, my Life (Behn)) that is coreferential with
the person who is musing aside. In the wake of Huddleston and Pullum we might
speculate here about an underlying thought of the sort ‘when he refers to a foolish
knight he might mean me’ or ‘when she refers to my love, my life she must mean
me’. The example from Aphra Behn in a way supports this speculation as Sir Feeble
soon afterwards states in resignation: “’tis not me she means”. Unfortunately he
seemingly breaks the pattern as he readily falls into “’tis I she means”. – Or does he?
Let us reconsider the passage from Behn. At the beginning of the scene Sir
Feeble wonders: “whom is’t meant to?”. The it here refers to Leticia’s friendly behaviour,
hence mean here may be paraphrased as “to intend (a remark, allusion, etc.) to
have a particular reference”. 9 Soon he is convinced that “She cannot mean it to me”
and few lines later reinforces this with “this is not to me”. Next comes “that must
be me”, which we have already discussed, immediately followed by “ ’tis I”. When
the verb mean is taken up again it comes in the ‘regular’ object-ClC “ ’tis not me she
means”. The repeated “’tis I she means – ’tis I she means” which, as the stage direction
says, is supposed to be uttered “merrily”, is the culmination point of this scene. Here
the subject case pronoun obviously serves emphatically to express Sir Feeble’s insight
that Leticia is directing her actions and words really to no other man but to him.
This last finding seems to run counter to the usual classification of the subject
case pronoun as ‘unstressed’ and the object case pronoun as ‘stressed’ (e.g., Visser
1963/73: 244). Wales (1996: 19), however, has shown that the pronoun paradigm
generally displays “ ‘instability’ of the subjective/objective case system”, such that
all subject and object forms may occur “reversed in function” in “some dialect of
English around the world.” (ibid.) Moreover the use of I is grammatically unusual
here as it is the predicate in the matrix clause of an object ClC – if that is the structure
here to begin with. Here the immediate situational and linguistic context may
help to assess this unusual contruction. First of all: the ‘running gag’ in this scene
is Sir Feeble’s doubt as to how he should pragmatically interpret Leticia’s words and
deeds. Are they directed toward him? Is there coreferentiality between “my Love,
my Life, my All”, for whom she calls, and himself? Does us in her urging “let us
haste away” include him or somebody else? Only when Leticia refers to herself as
9. OED s.v. vb. mean 1 (e.).