Why only subject and object?

April 9, 2018 10:36 PM

It feels like the convention in English, when stating pronouns, is to give nominative and accusative cases (eg writing she/her or they/them) Why only those two?

I do it as well without having thought about it before, and I suspect that the answer is that it’s convention. In which case, I’d be really interested in how and where the convention developed.

posted by frimble to Writing & Language (9 answers total)

Isn't that all the pronoun cases we have in English? There are the possessives but those are functionally different (since they don't function as nouns exactly). What would you add?
posted by brainmouse at 10:55 PM on April 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

I think the habit of giving 2 pronouns is a holdover from an older habit of giving all 3 options for clarity when gender-neutral constructed pronouns first became a thing (like zie / zir / zem).
posted by pseudostrabismus at 11:56 PM on April 9, 2018

It sort of sounds like you're under the impression that English has the same set of cases as some other language with a grammar you've studied (Latin, maybe? Given the examples you stated). This isn't the case. It is useful to draw comparisons and analogies between grammatical functions in different languages, but important to remember that they are ultimately just comparisons. brainmouse is right: in English, nouns have subjective and objective case. Grammatical constructions that indicate possession, indirect objects, etc., which in some languages are covered by special cases (genitive, dative, respectively -- to continue the Latin analogy), are in English either folded into these two cases or covered by another part of speech entirely. Indirect objects become objective; possession is indicated mainly through use of adjectives; no distinction is made between plain subjects and objects of address (i.e. no special vocative case).

In short, I'm not really sure what other cases you're suggesting should appear.
posted by Expecto Cilantro at 12:02 AM on April 10, 2018 [3 favorites]

This question got me curious, and I looked into it a bit more. My previous answer was written under the assumption that possessive adjectival forms of pronouns (his, her, mine, etc.) were considered something other than part of the declensions of those pronouns by virtue of being a different part of speech. Now I'm seeing that that may not be the agreed-upon thinking! What this means is that 1. my previous answer may be totally off, 2. I learned something today, and 3. I'm curious about the answer to the original question now as well.
posted by Expecto Cilantro at 12:09 AM on April 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

I often see three pronouns: subject/ object/ possessive (she/ her/ hers.) I don’t know if that’s standard or a holdover.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 12:20 AM on April 10, 2018

As someone who tends to list my pronouns in things, I would say because if you only put one ("they"), it'd seem confusing, like you started to say something and didn't finish. "They/them", to me, makes it clear that you're indicating your pronouns. And putting more cases might be seen as unnecessary since they can usually be inferred by the reader if you give two.
posted by ITheCosmos at 2:36 AM on April 10, 2018 [4 favorites]

I think it's a combination of two of the previous answers: habit from gender neutral pronouns other than 'they' and clarity. (And, apparently, a belief that possessive pronouns aren't pronouns.)

With gender neutral pronouns other than they, it is somewhat necessary to give the full set, both due to lack of familiarity and because people don't always agree on what the full set is. (See pseudostrabismus writing zie/zir/zem above. But plenty of people have z(i)e/hir/hirs, and I would have written zim not zem (which is maybe just spelling, but maybe not). And note that we swapped order, so apparently we have slightly different conventions for how you talk about pronouns.) The ze/hir set does seem to have enough traction that people do just give ze/hir, but I don't think I've seen someone do that for any other set.

I'm used to hearing people say things like "I use pronouns like he and him", i.e. giving examples. I think this is some combination of the following: the precise thing ('masculine pronouns') often isn't understood, the thing that does get understood ('male pronouns') is kind of icky (though tons of people give pronouns that way), and, well, if you use gendered pronouns, you have an agreed upon word to describe those pronouns, but other people don't and you're reinforcing the binary. Now, that's more about speaking that writing pronouns on name tags or in an email signature, which is what you seem to be asking about.
posted by hoyland at 4:42 AM on April 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

It's a compromise between detail and brevity, I think. there are five frequently used personal pronoun forms in English: subject, object, possessive adjectival, possessive nominative, and reflexive. The first three get used the most, and the reflexive is constructed in a very predictable way (objective + 'self/selves'). The possessive nominative is also pretty predictable --- it's usually possessive adjectival + 's', unless the possessive adjectival already ends in 's', in which case it's the same as the possessive adjectival (three exceptions, only one mainstream: 'my' becomes 'mine', the archaic 'thy' becomes 'thine', and Albert Gom's 'thou'-based gender-neutral 'hy' becomes 'hine').

So for the most part you can construct an entire pronoun system by morphological rules attached to those three. One interesting omission is that hardly anyone includes grammatical number. Semantically, of couse, individual pronouns are singular, but the grammar of 'they' (with regard to subject-verb agreement, etc.) is plural: he is, she is, they are. I'm not entirely certain about constructed pronouns: I think most of them are grammatically singular, but I wouldn't say, with absolute certainty, that "Ze is" would be a grammatical inflection.

Also apropos of unlisted pronouns and number: there does not seem to be a universal consensus on whether the reflexive form of semantically-singular "they" is "themself" (following the semantics) or "themselves" (following the grammar).
posted by jackbishop at 5:06 AM on April 10, 2018 [4 favorites]

We have he, him, and his. The only one lacking in English is what in German is called the dative, and for that we use the word “to” (or we omit it) and use the accusative.

Each of the following works:
I gave the apple to him.
I gave him the apple.
I gave it to him.
posted by yclipse at 5:42 AM on April 11, 2018