Between you and I

Last updated

"Between you and I" is an English phrase that has drawn considerable interest from linguists, grammarians, and stylists. It is commonly used by style guides as a convenient label for a construction where the nominative/subjective form of pronouns is used for two pronouns joined by and in circumstances where the accusative/oblique case would be used for a single pronoun, typically following a preposition, but also as the object of a transitive verb. One frequently cited use of the phrase occurs in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (1596–98). According to many style guides, the Shakespearian character who used the phrase should have written "between you and me". Use of this common construction has been described as "a grammatical error of unsurpassable grossness", [lower-alpha 1] although whether it is (or was) in fact an error is a matter of debate.

Contents

Use in literature

"Between you and I" occurs in act 3, scene 2, of The Merchant of Venice , in a letter written in prose by Antonio, the titular character, to his friend Bassanio: [4] [5] "Sweet Bassanio, ... all debts are cleared between you and I if I might but see you at my death." [6]

Writer and critic Henry Hitchings points to usage in William Congreve's The Double Dealer (1693) and in Mark Twain's letters. [7] Otto Jespersen found similar examples ("pronouns or nouns plus I after a preposition", in Robert J. Menner's words) in Ben Jonson, John Bunyan, Charles Dickens, and Graham Greene, and Menner adds Noah Webster, Samuel Pepys, Thomas Middleton, and others. [8] Writer Constance Hale notes that Ernest Hemingway frequently used pronouns this way: "Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers." [9]

Various critics have commented on Shakespeare's line. American writer Russell Baker, in his "Observer" column in The New York Times , considered it a grammatical error—"grammatically, of course, Shakespeare was wrong". He said Shakespeare probably "slipped accidentally": "My guess is that he was writing along rapidly, maybe at the end of the day when he was tired, was wishing he'd never come up with this Merchant of Venice idea, and eager to get over to the Mermaid Tavern for a beer with Jonson and Burbage". [10] Menner, in a 1937 article in American Speech , says that "it is evident that the phrase you and I was often felt to be grammatically indivisible, perhaps of frequency, and that we "cannot even be sure that 'between you and I' was originally hypercorrect in the Elizabethan age"; Menner does not say whether he believes the usage to be correct or incorrect. [8]

Others do not accuse Shakespeare of grammatical incorrectness: sociologist Robert Nisbet criticizes "word snobs" who condemn the phrase, [11] and lexicographer and OED editor Robert Burchfield states that what is incorrect for us was not necessarily incorrect for Shakespeare: "grammatical assumptions were different then", [1] a view shared by philologist and grammarian Henry Sweet. [12] However, Bryan A. Garner, who writes on usage and (especially legal) language, writes that even if the phrase was not incorrect for Shakespeare, it is and should be considered incorrect today, and cites linguist Randolph Quirk: "It is true that Shakespeare used both ['between you and I' as well as 'between you and me'], but that did not make it any more correct". [1]

Incorrectness and hypercorrection

The term hypercorrection , in this context, refers to grammatically incorrect usage, and is typically committed by speakers (or writers) who "overcorrect" what they think is a mistake, and thereby commit an error. [8] Kenneth G. Wilson, author of The Columbia Guide to Standard American English (1993), says hypercorrections are "the new mistakes we make in the effort to avoid old ones", and cites "between you and I" as an example—better, he says, to say "between the two of us". [13]

For the phrase to be considered an example of hypercorrection, it has to be considered grammatically incorrect in the first place. Grammarians and writers on style who judge the phrase this way include Paul Brians, [14] the Oxford Dictionaries, [15] and Grammar Girl: "it's just a rule that pronouns following prepositions in those phrases are always in the objective case." [16] A BBC survey from the early 2000s found that listeners ranked "between you and I" first in "most annoying grammar mistakes". [17] But many grammarians and linguists, including Steven Pinker, consider the phrase grammatically acceptable. [18]

Supposed causes

The cause for this particular error is given by such authorities as a kind of trauma [16] deriving from incorrect usage caused by "you" being both nominative and oblique, and the awareness of the possible incorrectness of "me": "People make this mistake because they know it's not correct to say, for example, 'John and me went to the shops'. They know that the correct sentence would be 'John and I went to the shops'. But they then mistakenly assume that the words 'and me' should be replaced by 'and I' in all cases." [15] In The Language Wars (2011), Henry Hitchings provides a similar explanation, adding that for many speakers "you and I" seem to belong together, [7] which is noted also by Kenneth Wilson. [13] That the problem typically occurs when two pronouns are used together is widely recognized: "these problems rarely arise when the pronoun [I] stands alone". [19] James Cochrane, author of Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English (2004), gives a similar explanation—in this case, "people"'s feeling some unease with a sentence like "Me and Bill went out for beers"; Cochrane does not, however, mark it as a hypercorrection, and suggests the phrase only came about "in the last twenty or so years" [20] —linguist J. K. Chambers, however, points out that the usage is not "a change in progress". [21]

J. K. Chambers investigated the phrase (as well as the closely related "with you and I") in an analysis of the role of education in the grammaticality of English speakers, in this case from Canada. Data from ninth-graders and their parents indicated little regional variation, but a significant variation between children and their parents, showing children were more likely to pick the "correct" pronoun or, in technical terms, to show "accusative case concord with conjoined pronouns". Chambers's explanation is that the children are likely to have had better education than their parents, and a study from 2008 of seven regions across Canada likewise showed that concord increased as the level of education increased. Chambers investigates a number of explanations offered, and accepts as one reason that the mistake occurs because of the considerable distance between the preposition and the second pronoun. [21]

Hypercorrection, contextual acceptability

More complex explanations than "trauma" or "unease" are provided by linguists and sociolinguists. Without expanding on the topic, Henry Hitchings considers the phrase a very specific, class-oriented kind of hypercorrection, which he calls "hyperurbanism", which "involves avoiding what is believed to be a 'low' mistake and using a supposedly classier word or pronunciation, although in fact the result is nothing of the sort". [7] A similar reason is given by Bryan Garner (pace Chambers), who says "this grammatical error is committed almost exclusively by educated speakers trying a little too hard to sound refined but stumbling badly", and says the phrase is "appallingly common". [1] The notion that educated people are prone to this error is shared by Grammar Girl, who says that Jessica Simpson can therefore be forgiven (for the 2006 song "Between You and I"). [22] According to legal scholar Patricia J. Williams, however, members of "the real upper class" recognize it immediately as substandard; she comments that such usage easily marks one as belonging to a lower class. [23] Sociolinguist Gerard van Herk discusses "between you and I" and similar phrases with pronoun errors (which are all incorrect according to prescriptive linguists) in the context of social mobility. [24]

One of the most notable linguists to accept the grammaticality of "between you and I" is Steven Pinker, even though he still calls it a "hyper-corrected solecism". Pinker's argument, in short, is that individual elements in coordinates need not have the same number as the coordinate itself: "she and Jennifer are" has two singular coordinates, though the coordination itself is plural. The same, Pinker argues in The Language Instinct (1994), applies to case, citing a famous phrase used by Bill Clinton and criticized by William Safire: "So just because [Al Gore and I] is an object that requires object case, it does not mean that [I] is an object that requires object case. By the logic of grammar, the pronoun is free to have any case it wants". [18] Writer Ben Yagoda, impressed by this argument, divides his thinking on the phrase's grammaticality in a pre-Pinker and a post-Pinker period, [17] and Peter Brodie, in a special issue of The English Journal devoted to grammar and usage, is likewise persuaded: "he also reminds us that these rules are generally dictated by snobbery and conceived as mere shibboleths". [25] While David D. Mulroy, in The War Against Grammar (2003), finds Pinker's argument not entirely persuasive, he says "these are matters on which reasonable people can disagree". [26]

According to linguist Joshua Fishman the phrase is, in some circles, "considered to be perfectly OK even in print", while others accept it "only in some contexts", and yet others never accept it at all. [27] Richard Redfern cites many examples of what is considered incorrect pronoun usage, many of which do not follow the "preposition + you and I" construction: "for he and I", "between he and Mr. Bittman". He argues that the "error" is widespread (Elizabeth II even committing it), and that it should become acceptable usage: "The rule asks native speakers of English to stifle their instinctive way of expressing themselves". [28]

In its treatment of "coordinate nominatives" used where the accusative (oblique) case would be used in non-coordinate constructions, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language differentiates different levels of acceptance, depending on the pronouns used and their position in the coordinate construction. Thus, a construction like "without you or I knowing anything about it" is "so common in speech and used by so broad a range of speakers that it has to be recognised as a variety of Standard English", while examples like "they've awarded he and his brother certificates of merit" and "... return the key to you or she" are classified as grammatically incorrect hypercorrection. [29]

Notes

  1. ↑ The characterization as "a grammatical error of unsurpassable grossness" is attributed by Bryan Garner to an unnamed "one commentator". [1] Bill Bryson attributes it to John Simon, [2] who apparently used the term in reference to Tennessee Williams's alleged use of "between he and I". [3]

Related Research Articles

In grammar, the accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to receive the direct object of a transitive verb.

In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.

A split infinitive is a grammatical construction in which an adverb or adverbial phrase separates the "to" and "infinitive" constituents of what was traditionally called the "full infinitive", but is more commonly known in modern linguistics as the to-infinitive. In the history of English language aesthetics, the split infinitive was often deprecated, despite its prevalence in colloquial speech. The opening sequence of the Star Trek television series contains a well-known example, "to boldly go where no man has gone before", wherein the adverb boldly was said to split the full infinitive, to go. Multiple words may split a to-infinitive, such as: "The population is expected to more than double in the next ten years."

English grammar is the set of structural rules of the English language. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and whole texts.

Adpositions are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations or mark various semantic roles. The most common adpositions are prepositions and postpositions.

In sociolinguistics, hypercorrection is nonstandard use of language that results from the overapplication of a perceived rule of language-usage prescription. A speaker or writer who produces a hypercorrection generally believes through a misunderstanding of such rules that the form or phrase they use is more "correct", standard, or otherwise preferable, often combined with a desire to appear formal or educated.

In grammar, an oblique or objective case is a nominal case other than the nominative case and, sometimes, the vocative.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English usage controversies</span> Disputes over "correct" English grammar and style

In the English language, there are grammatical constructions that many native speakers use unquestioningly yet certain writers call incorrect. Differences of usage or opinion may stem from differences between formal and informal speech and other matters of register, differences among dialects, and so forth. Disputes may arise when style guides disagree with each other, or when a guideline or judgement is confronted by large amounts of conflicting evidence or has its rationale challenged.

<i>Who</i> (pronoun) English pronoun

The pronoun who, in English, is an interrogative pronoun and a relative pronoun, used primarily to refer to persons.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English personal pronouns</span> Closed lexical category of the English language

The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and Middle English.

Relative clauses in the English language are formed principally by means of relative words. The basic relative pronouns are who, which, and that; who also has the derived forms whom and whose. Various grammatical rules and style guides determine which relative pronouns may be suitable in various situations, especially for formal settings. In some cases the relative pronoun may be omitted and merely implied.

Traditional grammar is a framework for the description of the structure of a language. The roots of traditional grammar are in the work of classical Greek and Latin philologists. The formal study of grammar based on these models became popular during the Renaissance.

Preposition stranding or p-stranding is the syntactic construction in which a so-called stranded, hanging or dangling preposition occurs somewhere other than immediately before its corresponding object; for example, at the end of a sentence. The term preposition stranding was coined in 1964, predated by stranded preposition in 1949. Linguists had previously identified such a construction as a sentence-terminal preposition or as a preposition at the end.

In linguistics, an inflected preposition is a type of word that occurs in some languages, that corresponds to the combination of a preposition and a personal pronoun. For instance, the Welsh word iddo is an inflected form of the preposition i meaning "to/for him"; it would not be grammatically correct to say *i ef.

In traditional grammar, a subject complement is a predicative expression that follows a copula, which complements the subject of a clause by means of characterization that completes the meaning of the subject.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English prepositions</span> Prepositions in the English language

English prepositions are words – such as of, in, on, at, from, etc. – that function as the head of a prepositional phrase, and most characteristically license a noun phrase object. Semantically, they most typically denote relations in space and time. Morphologically, they are usually simple and do not inflect. They form a closed lexical category.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Common English usage misconceptions</span> Beliefs about the use of the English language considered by others as wrong

This list comprises widespread modern beliefs about English language usage that are documented by a reliable source to be misconceptions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English possessive</span> Possessive words and phrases in the English language

In English, possessive words or phrases exist for nouns and most pronouns, as well as some noun phrases. These can play the roles of determiners or of nouns.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English determiners</span> Determiners in the English language

English determiners are words – such as the, a, each, some, which, this, and numerals such as six – that are most commonly used with nouns to specify their referents. The determiners form a closed lexical category in English.

Comprised of is an expression in English that means "composed of". This is thought by language purists to be improper because to "comprise" can already mean to "be composed of". By that definition, "comprised of" would be ungrammatical as it implies "composed of of". However, another widely accepted definition of to "comprise" is to "compose", hence the commonly accepted meaning of "comprised of" as "composed of".

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Garner, Bryan (2016). Garner's Modern English Usage. Oxford UP. pp. 111–112. ISBN   9780190491505.
  2. ↑ Bryson, Bill (2002). Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words. Crown Publishing Group. between you and I. ISBN   9780767910477.
  3. ↑ Simon, John I. (1980). Paradigms lost, reflections on literacy and its decline. C. N. Potter, distributed by Crown Publishers. p. 18. ISBN   9780517540343.
  4. ↑ Bryant, Joseph Allen (1986). Shakespeare & the Uses of Comedy. Lexington: UP of Kentucky. p. 89. ISBN   9780813130958.
  5. ↑ Kahn, Coppelia (2010). "The Cuckoo's Note: Male Friendship and Cuckoldry in The Merchant of Venice". In Harold Bloom (ed.). William Shakespeare's the Merchant of Venice. Infobase. pp. 19–29. ISBN   9781438134352.
  6. ↑ Shakespeare, William (1994). Taylor, Gary; Wells, Stanley (eds.). The Complete Works. Oxford: Clarendon. pp. 425–51. ISBN   9780198182849.
  7. 1 2 3 Hitchings, Henry (2011). The Language Wars: A History of Proper English . Farrar, Straus and Giroux. pp.  187–88. ISBN   9781429995030.
  8. 1 2 3 Menner, Robert J. (1937). "Hypercorrect forms in American English". American Speech . 12 (3): 167–78. doi:10.2307/452423. JSTOR   452423.
  9. ↑ Hale, Constance (2001). Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose. Crown. p. 67. ISBN   9780767908924.
  10. ↑ Baker, Russell (6 July 1988). "Observer: A Slip of the Quill". The New York Times . Retrieved 25 July 2014.
  11. ↑ Nisbet, Robert A. (1983). Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary. Cambridge: Harvard UP. p. 270. ISBN   9780674700666.
  12. ↑ Sweet, Henry (1892). A Short Historical English Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon. p.  104.
  13. 1 2 Wilson, Kenneth G. (1993). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English . New York: Columbia UP. p.  230. ISBN   9780231069892.
  14. ↑ Brians, Paul. "I/me/myself/" . Retrieved 26 July 2014.
  15. 1 2 "Between you and me". Oxford Dictionary of English. 2014. Archived from the original on May 2, 2013. Retrieved 26 July 2014.
  16. 1 2 Fogarty, Mignon. "Grammar Girl: Between You and Me". Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing . Retrieved 26 July 2014.
  17. 1 2 Yagoda, Ben (2014). You Need to Read This: The Death of the Imperative Mode, the Rise of the American Glottal Stop, the Bizarre Popularity of "Amongst," and Other Cuckoo Things That Have Happened to the English Language. Penguin. p. 58. ISBN   9780698157828.
  18. 1 2 Pinker, Steven (24 January 1994). "Grammar Puss". The New Republic . Retrieved 24 March 2018.
  19. ↑ Manser, Martin (2011). Good Word Guide: The Fast Way to Correct English - Spelling, Punctuation, Grammar and Usage. A&C Black. p. 157. ISBN   9781408123324.
  20. ↑ Cochrane, James (2005). Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English. Sourcebooks. p. 14. ISBN   9781402203312.
  21. 1 2 Chambers, J. K. (2009). "Education and the Enforcement of Standard English". In Kawaguchi, Yuji; Minegishi, Makoto; Durand, Jacques (eds.). Corpus Analysis and Variation in Linguistics. John Benjamins. pp. 53–66. ISBN   9789027207685.
  22. ↑ Fogarty, Mignon (2009). The Grammar Devotional: Daily Tips for Successful Writing from Grammar Girl. Holt. p. 20. ISBN   9781429964401.
  23. ↑ Touré (2011). Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now. Simon and Schuster. p. 185. ISBN   9781439177570.
  24. ↑ Herk, Gerard Van (2012). What Is Sociolinguistics. Wiley. p. 54. ISBN   9781405193191.
  25. ↑ Brodie, Peter (1996). "Never Say NEVER: Teaching Grammar and Usage". The English Journal . 85 (7): 77–78. doi:10.2307/820514. JSTOR   820514.
  26. ↑ Mulroy, David D. (2003). The war against grammar. Boynton/Cook. ISBN   9780867095517.
  27. ↑ Fishman, Joshua A. (28 June 2010). European Vernacular Literacy. Multilingual Matters. p. 1. ISBN   9781847694782.
  28. ↑ Redfern, Richard K. (1996). "Pronouns Are Highly Personal". The English Journal . 85 (7): 80–81. doi:10.2307/820515. JSTOR   820515.
  29. ↑ Huddleston, Rodney; Pullum, Geoffrey (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 463. ISBN   0-521-43146-8.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.