It's me who isn't sure about clefts

lolwhites · Post by **lolwhites** » Tue Dec 06, 2005 12:52 pm

My partner, a NNS English-teacher, asked me whether it was better to say It was her who... or It was she who... in cleft sentences. My instinct was to go for the former as I find the latter a bit too formal; however, her grammar book said that the latter was the "usual" form and the former was marked as informal. I don't know the name of the book but it was a latest (2003) edition published in France.

Now, I agree that It was her who... is less formal than It was she who... , but I feel that the more "normal" form is with me/him/her, while I/he/she sounds a bit like something I would expect the Queen to say, but hardly anyone else.

So, my question to you all is this: Am I from the right or wrong side of the tracks?

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Tue Dec 06, 2005 1:43 pm

I'm partly with you. You use the word "say" a lot and I get the feeling that "me" etc in spoken English are disjunctive pronouns, whose use includes being object pronouns, of course.

Though in a more formal written situation or a formal speech I might plump for "she":

"Margaret Thatcher will go down in history as a great leader. It was she/her who .........."

My choice would depend on the register of whatever this is an extract from.

lolwhites · Post by **lolwhites** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 1:13 pm

Sure, context, context, context...

Maybe I could rephrase my question this way: The grammar book stated that I/he/she was the more normal/neutral form and me/him/her was "colloquial". Do you agree?

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 2:54 pm

Put like that I disagree completely. I think the "me" version is standard spoken English. And standard informal written English. For me thats's "normal/neutral".

"Colloquial" sounds so loaded, doesn't it? Slightly disapproving? Meaning "slangy"?

What does the book reckon is the pronoun of -body words? If it says that "they/them/their" is colloquial then I'm afraid it's "trop snob pour moi".

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 5:08 pm

I find "it is/was I who" to be absurd, but don't feel any of the other forms to be overly formal.

Horses for courses.

On questions of register, what is needed is a large corpus to check usages out on. There are too many idiolectical differences to trust one's inner grammatical ear.

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 8:18 pm

No, I don't think them overly formal in the right place.

If anybody out there does in fact say "It is I who............." would there be an s on the end of the verb following?

And why doesn't "It's me" change to "They're us" anyway?

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 9:41 pm

I have done a little checking on the BNC and my intuitions seem to be partially backed up.

I entered the string '"it was I/me/him/he/she/her/they/them who".

In every case the nominative pronoun was the most common. However there was a close tie between "it was me who" (32 hits) and "it was I who" (45 hits).

On the other hand the third person pronouns were overwhelmingly nominative.
they (59) --- them (1)
he (188) --- him (6)
she (85) --- her (3)

Something interesting happens when we substitute 'that' for 'who'. 'me' (16) now outnumbers 'I' (1) by a massive margin, and the total count for 'me' and 'I' with who/that is now approximately equal (but for some unknown reason "It is I who" has 22 hits, compared to only 2 for "It is me who"

Secondly the accusative pronuns now equal or outnumber the nominative
they (0) ---- them (4)
he (10) ---- him (9)
she (1) ---- her (6)

It iappears therefore that 'that' is considered less formal than 'who' in cleft relatives, and combines with the less formal accusative forms.

When there is no cleft clause the frequencies for "it was I/me/him/he/she/her/they/them" are as follows. (I don't give any data for 'her' because it is not possible to autoomatically specify her as a pronoun and not a possessive adjective. The figure comes by subtracting the number of hits for the cleft clause from the total number of hits for the string):

I ---- (191 - 46) = 145; me ---- ( 167 - 48 ) = 119
they ----- (116 - 59) = 57; them ----- (27 - 5) = 22
he ----- (311 - 198) = 113; him (104 - 15) = 89
she ----- ( 159 -86) = 73

I tnink we can draw the following conclusions. That in non-cleft clauses the nominative pronoun is most common in every case. That there are differences according to the individual pronoun.

That in cleft clauses 'me' and 'I' are equally common, but in all other cases there is a very marked difference in frequency between the nominative and accusative, and this difference is much, much greater than when there is no cleft clause present.

Or , to put it simply, there are a lot more Queens in Britain than lolwhites realizes.

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 9:44 pm

If anybody out there does in fact say "It is I who............." would there be an s on the end of the verb following?

The CGEL states that you use the third person after 'me' but the first person after 'I'.

lolwhites · Post by **lolwhites** » Thu Dec 08, 2005 9:53 am

Or , to put it simply, there are a lot more Queens in Britain than lolwhites realizes.

Oooh, get Madam!

Seriously, though, thanks for doing the corpus searches. I guess you learn something new every day.

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Thu Dec 08, 2005 12:16 pm

Yes, but.

The BNC is 90% based on written sources. It's not surprising that the more formal is presented as being in common use.

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Thu Dec 08, 2005 10:50 pm

The BNC is 90% based on written sources. It's not surprising that the more formal is presented as being in common use.

Well, let's restrict our research to the spoken corpus (which incidnetally is nearly all informal). Again the results are surprising.

It was I ----- 99
It was me --- 56
It was he ---- 20
It was him ----21
It was they ---- 21
It was them ---- 11
It was she ---- 10

The nominatives are still fairly common, but the big surprise is to find that 'it was I' is more common in spoken speech than written, and that 'me' is slightly more common in written speech than 'I'.

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Fri Dec 09, 2005 6:30 am

Now it's I who am surprised.