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Hard Cases

She likes him. He likes her

When the objects of a verb are personal pronouns, case raises its ugly head, an attribute otherwise confined in English to the possessive. We have already encountered two kinds of possessive personal pronouns. The first set--my, your, his, her, its, our, their--are used only as determiners. With some overlap (his, its), another set of independent possessive pronouns is used for possessive nominals. If one wants to be technical, one can call the more usual possessive pronouns (my, your, his, her, our, their) dependent possessive personal pronouns. The following sentences use first one and then the other:

(1) My boss is a friend of mine.
(2) Your boss is a friend of yours.
(3) His boss is a friend of his.
(4) Her boss is a friend of hers.
(5) ?Its boss is a friend of itss.
(6) Our boss is a friend of Ours.
(7) And their boss is a friend of thers.

Nominative vs. Objective Case in Pronouns. We've also encountered a set of personal pronouns which can be used for subjects-- I, you, he, she, it, we, they. In traditional grammar, these pronouns are said to be in the nominative case. With some overlap (you, it, a different set of personal pronouns must be used for the complements (objects) of verbs and prepositions--me, you, her, him, it, us, them. In traditional grammar, these are said to be in the objective case. The difference in cases is the reason we would say switch the pronouns completely in sentences (8) and (9):

(8) She likes him.
(9) He likes her.

The following sentences use the pronouns for each person in the nominative and objective cases:

(10) I want George to give me a sunflower.
(11) You want George to give you a sunflower.
(12) He wants George to give him a sunflower.
(13) She wants George to give her a sunflower.
(14) It wants George to give it a sunflower.
(15) We want George to give us a sunflower.
(16) And they want George to give them a sunflower.

Reflexive Pronouns. The reflexive personal pronouns--myself, yourself, himself, herself, itself, ourselves, themselves--are used in object positions when they refer to an earlier noun or pronoun in the same sentence, as in sentences (17) and (18):

(17) I hurt myself.
(18) The hidden observer revealed himself.
Reflexive pronouns can also be used for emphasis, as in sentences (19) and (20) below:
(19) I myself have no problem with this.
(29) We ourselves are at fault.

The reflexives are unusual in allowing for a distinction in number in the second person (yourself, yourselves). The singular themself, on the other hand, is not an accepted usage, even if one is trying to avoid gender problems. Theirselves is also non-Standard and should be avoided:

(21) *A professor should keep themself from playing favorites.
(22) *They kept to theirselves.

Exercise 1: Identifying Personal Pronouns

Trying not to sneak peeks back at the lists just given, see if you can say whether the underlined words are nominative personal pronouns, objective personal pronouns, possessive personal pronouns used as determiners, independent possessive personal pronouns used as nominals, or reflexive pronouns.
1.01 Barbara fed us turkey.
1.02 The cat is afraid of them.
1.03 The company offered him a job.
1.04 Deanne thinks him a god.
1.05 Esther treated herself well.
1.06 It followed the boy home.
1.07 Luanne loves me.
1.08 Muriel is a pal of mine.
1.09 She gave my aunt a kumquat.
1.10 Everyone had themselves a good time.
1.11 Thomas ate my sandwich.
1.12 You are the greatest!

Nasty Nominatives. In theory, the nominative pronouns should be used when they are complements of a verb like be and refer back to the subject. In practice, their use in such cases sounds stagy and affected. In everyday speech, Standard American tends to prefer sentences (23) and (24) to the technically more "correct" sentence (25):

(23) It is me.
(24) It's me.
(25) It is I.

Efforts to teach people to use "I" in such situations have simply led people to regard "I" as more formal in general, leading to its incorrect use following a preposition, when "me" is the correct choice:

(26) *This was important for him and I.

The process whereby efforts to speak "correct" English simply leads to new errors is known as hypercorrection and is a well-known symptom of having taken too many English classes. Even so, it may be safest to use the nominative pronoun in such cases when writing formal prose.

Diagramming Stand-Alone Pronouns. Since stand-along pronouns replace noun phrases, they are diagrammed under the NP label in phrase structure trees. Specifying that they are pronouns by adding Pn, as in the example below, is optional.

Pronoun Reference. English nouns also used to have inflections for different uses in a sentence (case), but have retained only the possessive case. Many other languages still have more complex case systems for nouns, so it would be churlish to complain about a few pronouns. The most common problem in pronoun usage is ambiguity in pronoun reference, created when the reader can't be sure which of the preceding NPs is the antecedent of the pronoun used:

(27) ?George and Homer missed the deer, and it kicked him.
(28) ?George and Homer missed the deer, and it escaped him.
(29) ?George and Homer missed the deer, and it haunted them
In sentence (27), we understand that the "it" refers to "the deer," but we aren't sure which man was kicked. In sentence (28), we seem to have used a singular pronoun to refer to two people--a problem also called number shift. In sentence (29), the question is whether the "it" refers only to "the deer" (now presumably a ghost) or to the entire preceding statement, "George and Homer missed the deer." As our sentences grow longer and more complex, it becomes easier to fall into such ambiguities.

Just for the Record: the Accusative. What we have called the objective case is also called the accusative case in some grammars. Like the term nominative, the term "accusative" comes to English from the grammars of other languages where nouns change form to indicate their sentence function; the accusative is often used as the term for the case of direct objects.

How Much of This Will be on the Test?
You should be able to recognize personal pronouns, their cases and uses: nominative, objective, possessive (dependent and independent), and reflexive. You should be able to identify problems in pronoun reference in a passage of prose. You should be familiar with the terms accusative and hypercorrection.