Teacher Discussion Forums

Thanks to everyone for their responses to my many posts. For my next question, I'd like to know if I can use himself instead of he. Since the subject of the sentence is he, I think I am ok as far as the "rule" goes for using a reflexive pronoun, but somehow it doesn't sound right to me.

He reinforces and exercises his existing language skills by helping others who are not as fluent as he (is).

Oh, and another question. "Is" is optional, correct?



Thanks again

Donna

No, you cannot use "himself" in this example. Grammarians have recently conceded that the word "than" can function as both a conjunction and a preposition in comparative structures. They tend to avoid granting the same status to "as", but it obviously can function as a preposition as well.

We can say, "He bought it for himself" and "He appeared in the movie as himself."

Digressing a little bit here, it's instructive to remember that when the once-famous slogan, "Winston tastes good like a cigarrette should." was first introduced by sponsors of broadcasts, the grammatically elite types, like Walter Cronkite, refused to say it. They told the sponsor that the word "like" was a preposition and that their complex sentence required a true conjunction, i.e. "Winston tastes good as a cigarrette should." If a word is used as a conjunction by a large population, then it is a conjunction.

So, if the word "as" can be a preposition, then why can't we use a reflexive pronoun in your example? Because it's being used in a prepositional phrase (or elliptical clause) which is complementing an adjective (really the adverb of an adjective, the 1st "as") rather than a verb.

We don't say, "She thinks my sister is much prettier than herself." We can say, "She thinks my sister is much prettier than she is." and if you have been conditioned to believe that the word "than" or "as" cannot be a preposition then you can say, "She thinks my sister is much prettier than she.", but only say and write that sort of sentence around academics. The word "is" is not optional IMO.

If you google any adjective +prep + reflexive pronoun phrase (such as the example Ouyang gave) you'll get a good few hits though. I think in the original example it even has a kind of faux-high class nuance, so I don't know that it is clear cut from a very descriptivist perspective.

Thanks Ouyang.
I guess I am not clear on what complements mean. I thought that if a reflexive pronoun's antecedent is the subject, it can be the object of a prepositional phrase or verb. What do you mean by complements?

So, if the word "as" can be a preposition, then why can't we use a reflexive pronoun in your example? Because it's being used in a prepositional phrase (or elliptical clause) which is complementing an adjective (really the adverb of an adjective, the 1st "as") rather than a verb.

Thanks,

Donna

Linguists do not always agree on whether a prepositional phrase is functioning as an adjunct or as a complement. Most definitions of a complement require that it cannot be removed from the sentence. However, most linguists also accept that a direct object is a verb complement. Direct objects can be removed.
"Have you eaten yet?" "Can you drive?"

See http://ling.wisc.edu/~yafei/courses/330_01/wk4.html for additional criteria for deterimining complements. Ya Fei includes a "do so" constituency test.

We can say "In the movie, Michael Jordan appears as himself, and so does Yao Ming." We don't say "Michael Jordan appears as himself, and so does George Clooney as his coach." This constituency test tells us that the prepositional phrase "as himself" is complementing the verb "appears".

Comparative prepositional phrases and dependent clauses are used as complements of adjectives and adverbs.

We can't say, "He drives faster." or "She is prettier" unless a previous clause has provided the context for a comparison. The issue of context is what makes the requirement of irremovability flawed as a test for complements.

Also, note that not all prepositional objects in a predicate are going to have the same relationship to a verb. The three prepositional phrases in the following sentence each have different functions, "The price depends on the size of the fish at that restaurant." The first phrase cannot be removed from the verb "depend" it complements it. The next phrase complements the noun "size", but it could be removed if a previous clause provided context. The next phrase is an adverbial adjunct.

What woodcutter wrote is true. People do use reflexive pronouns in comparative phrases, as well as in other places where they don't belong, as "a kind of faux-high class nuance". It connotes an emphasis that they are consciously choosing. When I write "we cannot say something", I really mean I don't think you shoud teach it. I think it's in the best interest of students to use the standard grammar of a language except where the standard is based on unnatural, flawed grammatical principles.

ouyang wrote:Grammarians have recently conceded that the word "than" can function as both a conjunction and a preposition in comparative structures.

It depends on who you're talking about. I believe William Safire is one of the few who do. (Ex: She's better than me.) I'm under the impression, however, that most grammarians do not "concede" that, but rather militate for She's better than I — at least concerning outstanding English for the sake of publishing, business, self-enrichment, and such.

You'll permit me a little rant. I haven't had one for ages.

jotham, you cannot seriously be suggesting that any two people, having played a match of some kind with two other people, would ever say, think or write, however outstanding they were being:

"We thought that you were not as good as we but it turns out that you are better than we"

Not even if all four were these grammarians of yours.

Or that one person would come out with:

"I thought that you were not as good as I but it turns out that you are better than I"

Your quest for "outstanding English for the sake of publishing, business, self-enrichment, and such" really sounds as if you have no instinct, or don't trust your instinct, for what is acceptable The only explanation I can find, though I'm sure that you are an exception, is that there are people who are so insecure, or ashamed of themselves or something, that they swallow every single half-baked invented shibboleth, concocted by largely self-appointed arbiters. Out here in the real world native speakers for the most part trust their own judgement.

However, if proof were needed, I could cite an arguably largely well-written and formal source. Let's look at "The New Yorker" but it could be any other:

Exact phrase "than me" only from www.thenewyorker.com. 126 hits from writers such as Paul Theroux and Hanif Koureishi.

Exact phrase "than I" without "am, was, do, did, can, will, must, should" from the same site. Not one result.

Nobody has written "than I" in the web version of The New Yorker without following it up with an auxiliary or a main verb.

Nor have they in The Times. Nor in The New York Times either.

I'm at a loss to understand why you or anybody else should state a preference for a structure that when it comes to the crunch isn't really used at all. It's setting the bar far too high for yourself. Leaving aside how high you are setting it for students.

English is a dirty, slutty language that has nothing to go on except for the gut feelings of its users. Some people seem to want it to be more respectable and, as you say, "militate for" this or that or the other. I don't agree, don't recognise their authority anyway, and can assure you that "than me" is perfect English that would not raise the eyebrows of a single person in any situation whatsoever. How do I know? Because I do.

PS Guess how many google hits there are for "rather you than I" .

Go on guess.

Then look.

The funny thing is that the average speaker on hearing "She is better than I" will probably think it sounds posh, rather than wrong, and will be annoyed that the speaker is claiming an aristocratic status to which they are not duly entitled. Thus it isn't "wrong", in my book, but a grammatical declaration of a persons general love for poshness.

Personally I think we should all stop worrying about subject/object pronouns altogether. People get so upset. Shouldn't us?

I've got no beef with people saying "than I" is right, although I agree that it sounds pretentious. Mine is with them claiming its higher status over "than me", which is patently baloney.

Even if you put it in the most objectionable elitist terms:

I'm a privately-educated upper-middle-class background home-counties born English language and literature graduate teacher. If there is an aspirational form of English, what would be taught in elocution classes or "how to hide your humble background classes" if they existed, then it's the English that I already speak. There are many things that betray people's not belonging to this group, such as accent, vocabulary and various grammatical solecisms but take it from me: this is not one of the passwords to the club to which I belong and have belonged all my life. Nobody says "than I". In fact I'd suspect anybody who did of trying too hard to belong.

Note that I don't think like this (well not usually).

JuanTwoThree wrote:You'll permit me a little rant. I haven't had one for ages.

jotham, you cannot seriously be suggesting that any two people, having played a match of some kind with two other people, would ever say, think or write, however outstanding they were being:

"We thought that you were not as good as we but it turns out that you are better than we"

This is an unnatural sounding sentence for reasons other than conjunctions. It's the writer's job to make every part of the sentence sound good in its entirety. I'd rather say, "I didn't think you'd be quite so good as we are, but it turns out that you are." This sounds much better when you manipulate the sentence. The unnecessarily repeated pronoun sounds funny because it's...repeated. But none of this matters because it's just people talking informally. This is precisely what I'm not talking about. Informal discussions need not be polished. And what's wrong with supplying the verb at the end if it sounds better? You make it sound like that doesn't count. But it does count.
But in the end, it could be another difference between British and American. British seem to want to lower the standards of publishing to informal chit-chat; while Americans, on the whole, try to elevate the discussion to organized structure and thinking. It goes back to education. Americans teach structuralism to our children; we teach them five-paragraph essays with an orderly structure, the advantage of topic sentences, paragraph flow, etc., which helps them write in an orderly fashion, with the added benefit of thinking and talking in an orderly fashion as well.

Your quest for "outstanding English for the sake of publishing, business, self-enrichment, and such" really sounds as if you have no instinct, or don't trust your instinct, for what is acceptable The only explanation I can find, though I'm sure that you are an exception, is that there are people who are so insecure, or ashamed of themselves or something, that they swallow every single half-baked invented shibboleth, concocted by largely self-appointed arbiters. Out here in the real world native speakers for the most part trust their own judgement.

It hasn't to do with instinct. Your definition of instinct is raw thoughts. My definition is unstudied response or expression of those thoughts. I don't believe that my raw thoughts are wrong; I just believe there are poor ways, adequate ways, better ways, and perfect ways of expressing them. So when I study how to communicate better or more effectively, I'm not shunning my "instinct" or thoughts, but rather empowering or enabling them. When I'm just shooting the breeze with people, adequate communication is adequate. Just like I don't need to practice chopsticks and it's still enjoyable to many.
When I'm showing my writing prowess, however, and want to attract as large a base of thoughtful readers as possible, adequate isn't sufficient; then I would shoot, strive, and sweat, and even lose sleep for perfect. Likewise when I play Beethoven, I can't get away without practice or struggle. I could play it adequately and get polite applause from those who know better, or I could perform superbly, move people's hearts, and get a standing ovation.

However, if proof were needed, I could cite an arguably largely well-written and formal source. Let's look at "The New Yorker" but it could be any other:
Exact phrase "than me" only from www.thenewyorker.com. 126 hits from writers such as Paul Theroux and Hanif Koureishi.
Exact phrase "than I" without "am, was, do, did, can, will, must, should" from the same site. Not one result.

The New Yorker is full of stories. When I do searches, it seems nearly to be in quotes all the time. Same with the New York Times, (where William Safire works). They're not going to change what people say.

Nobody has written "than I" in the web version of The New Yorker without following it up with an auxiliary or a main verb.

What's wrong with following it up? Why doesn't that count? Maybe that's part of their editing guidelines. Such doesn't countermand the grammarians' position.

"Better than I" in New York Times gets 4,490 hits.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%2 ... nochrome=1
"Better than me" gets 1,380 hits, and almost always in quotes:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%2 ... nochrome=1

English is a dirty, slutty language that has nothing to go on except for the gut feelings of its users.

This is a perfect description of descriptivist philosophy. I'm sure glad there aren't descriptivists in music, sports, or other field of refinement or attainment. Nothing is wrong with slutty, dirty, gut instinct; but neither should it bar others from seeking otherwise or somehow replace attainment and a striving for excellence or perfection. It's the human spirit to excel; why should written communication be different from any other endeavor? To each his or her own.
I don't criticize those who use than me, just as I don't those who wear jeans and sandals instead of a suit and tie depending on the situation. So why do you criticize those who use than I, granted the entirety of the sentence is sound?

Intrinsic excellence vs we luv smutty again. Always the extremes.

though there is no intrinsic excellence in standard inglish I do wonder why so many of u use posh language on da forum cos probly most computer users write like this to save time and descriptive finking says horses for courses innit. dont say it is cos its a teechers forum cos u wouldnt ever do it even if it wuz on on some teen pop site i bet

woodcutter wrote:Intrinsic excellence vs we luv smutty again. Always the extremes.

Precisely. Why must everything be so black and white?

though there is no intrinsic excellence in standard inglish

Exactly right. There is no intrinsic excellence in English or any other language in the world. Just as intrinsic beauty in buildings isn't automatic. Only people can make it so. If we let down our hair and standards all the time, English could easily slip and become just as imprecise or incapable of expressing abstractions as any number of tribal languages, for example.
When a population become more sophisticated in their thinking, the language automatically develops along those lines as well. Highly-structured and efficacious communication doesn't render people sophisticated. Rather sophisticated people render communication highly-structured and efficacious.

jotham, you misrepresent me.

You have to compare like with like. Obviously "than I" is totally unobjectionable when it's followed by a verb. Perhaps the following up with a verb is the most natural thing to do.

But we are talking about disjunctive "I", where "I" is used in the place of "me". Well, I am.

My objection is not to disjunctive "than I" per se. Obviously (very few) people do use "I" in this way. Rather they than I! MY problem is with this kind of guffery:

http://www.bartleby.com/68/25/825.html

which sets out the case for "I" used disjunctively being somehow de rigeur at a certain level of formality. It not only flies in the face of my own experience, which does seem to rather annoy me I have to say, but is also couched in the most pompous of terms.

You go ahead and use "I" where almost everybody uses "me". I'm not telling you that you're wrong.

The USA does sometimes seem to have created a free society that then wants to be bogged down by rules for everything: dating, not wearing white shoes before Labor Day, making up rules for English only to find that hardly anybody obeys them.......

I wonder how much of it started as a WASP defence against all these upstart incomers.

JuanTwoThree wrote:But we are talking about disjunctive "I", where "I" is used in the place of "me". Well, I am.

I agree that sometimes the disjunctive sounds a bit odd at times (and perhaps odder with time). But here is where we differ: in such case, I would rather manipulate the sentence so it reads I am rather than throw the baby out with the bath water by completely replacing it with plain me — at least in certain contexts, obviously not all.
But in fact, the disjunctive I doesn't sound that odd to me. Maybe I'm used to reading it, or perhaps it's more natural in American than British. For example, Americans also freely use subjunctives in places that British have completely abandoned it as quirky, or perhaps for the higher calling of linguistic progress. We're still much more comfortable saying "I recommend that you read that book," than the British "I recommend that you should read that book." It seems Americans are better preservers of the language than British, from whom English originated.

My objection is not to disjunctive "than I" per se. Obviously (very few) people do use "I" in this way. Rather they than I! MY problem is with this kind of guffery:

http://www.bartleby.com/68/25/825.html

which sets out the case for "I" used disjunctively being somehow de rigeur at a certain level of formality. It not only flies in the face of my own experience, which does seem to rather annoy me I have to say, but is also couched in the most pompous of terms.

I think I can sympathize with the British point of view, because Standard British isn't the natural dialect of a plurality of people. It really is just another small dialect dominating over — I don't know — hundreds of other small dialects. Such a scenario just magnifies the attitudes of British elitism that go along with it. I say keep up the fight for equality; even if that translates into criticizing British standard. In the States, however, Standard American is spoken by a plurality of people, and it really does sound accentless or neutral to most other Americans, which enhances our commonness.

The USA does sometimes seem to have created a free society that then wants to be bogged down by rules for everything: dating, not wearing white shoes before Labor Day, making up rules for English only to find that hardly anybody obeys them.......

The USA is a free society in which people may choose to prosper or just slide. American structure is more favorable (than the structures of most other societies) to those that strive to succeed on their own effort. Our editing sophistication, an art that continually develops, matches our general American commitment to excellence applied to every field.

It always seems to me that Americans are on the whole rather fond of imprecision, as a rule, and use, like, a lot of, y'know, expressions and stuff that indicate the speaker doesn't actually know everything, and thus precision is a waste of time. There's something to be said for that (and the difference between women and men in regard to attitudes towards imprecision and hedging is huge). Let's not get into U.S (or gender!)bashing/praising though.

Anyway, I would be in favour of saying "better than I" if it was in fact the traditional upper-class form. Sticking to these norms is a good way to keep communication smooth. More importantly it tells us that the speaker reads a lot and values education and the norms used by educated people - that is why people here always waste precious seconds capitalizing and worrying about apostrophes even though they sheepishly claim to be descriptivists.

In fact, few people say "better than I", and in certain circles it only makes you look like you wish to be well-educated.

Precision, by the way, isn't really the point - no language has a major problem with precision, it depends on the user and their relationship to the reader/listener. English does have a lot of words, and thus I suppose a lot of ways to be precise in shorthand, but that also makes much of English obscure to many native speakers.