LINGUIST List 3.651

Tue 25 Aug 1992

Disc: Drift, Coordination and Case-Marking

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1. Richard Ogden, drift
2. , Re: 3.648 Drift
3. David Gil, COORDINATION AND CASE MARKING

I don't think anyone has yet mentioned those forms with 'we', as in
'we three kings' or 'we linguists' or 'we the peoples'...
Does anyone have an explanation why it's always 'we' and almost never
'us', even when the phrase is enxt to the verb and acting as object,
as in 'no one seems to pay much attention to we linguists'?

Richard Ogden

Message 2: Re: 3.648 Drift

I am very happy about the present discussion on drift in case-marking and
pronouns in coordinated structures, since I am actually writing a PhD
thesis on coordination with emphasis on peculiarities in coordination - in
particular unbalanced coordination , as I call these asymmetric types.

I certainly think that the examples in English where the second conjunct is
an unexpected nominative pronoun belong to a more general phenomenon and
are not just triggered by the word and itself - or more generally by
distance only.

My theory of coordination is one where the conjunction is head of its own
projection and the conjuncts are sitting in specifier and complement
position of that phrase. This makes it possible to see distance in
configurational terms, where the second conjunct is in a position which
makes it ungoverned, because it is not in the local domain of whatever
governs the coordination phrase.

It is not only pronouns that lose case when being part of the second
conjunct. In English, it is not so easy to see case in other things than
pronouns, but it is generally assumed that prepositions assign case, and
that this is the reason a that-complementised clause cannot be its
complement. And yet, it is well-known from the literature that a sentence
like (i) is OK, in spite of (ii).

(i) Fido thought about the bone and that he wanted to eat it
(ii) * Fido thought about that he wanted to eat it

My most recent example sentence involving a nominative-case pronoun as the
object of a verb is actually from Linguist List 16 July, from a posting on
help with housing:

(iii) Can someone help my wife and I find housing in Austin Texas...

I look forward to more discussion and examples!

 Janne B.
Johannessen

-------------------------------------
Janne Bondi Johannessen
Institutt for lingvistikk og filosofi
Universitetet i Oslo
P.b. 1102 Blindern
N-0317 Oslo Norway
Tel (02) 85 68 14
e-mail: jannebjhedda.uio.no

Some examples of case marking varying across conjuncts in
Biblical Hebrew and other languages are cited in

Gil, David "Case Marking, Phonological Size and Linear Order",
Studies in Transitivity, Syntax and Semantics 15, Academic Press,
1982.

These examples typically form the pattern:

A-NOM CONJ B-ACC

David Gil
Department of English Language and Literature
National University of Singapore
ellgildnusvm.bitnet