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From: lilandbr@scn.org (Leland Bryant Ross)
Subject: Re: How do you parse
Message-ID: <DwIry6.2G0@scn.org>
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Reply-To: lilandbr@scn.org (Leland Bryant Ross)
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Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 03:20:29 GMT
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[Why was ""It's me"?" dropped from the subject line of this filament?

In a previous article, dmunroe@vcd.hp.com (Dave Munroe) says:

>Ron Kephart  wrote:
>
>>I recall learning (don't recall exactly where) that 'it is me' 
>>started out as 'it am I' with the word order as OVS.
>
>But where would the OVS word order come from?  Has English ever used anything
>other than SVO or SOV in common phrases?  The only remnant of SOV that I can
>think of at the moment is "... I thee wed".
>
I don't know about OVS here.  "It" in "It's me" or "It's I" doesn't feel 
like an object to me; it's (!) certainly *not* a form (nominative or 
accusative or whatever case) of the third-person singular neuter personal 
pronoun, the one that contracts with "he/him" and "she/her" and whatever 
the current common-gender fad form may be.  If it *were* (aka "was") THAT 
"it", the question we would be gossiping about would be whether we "should"
say 

He (or She) is I.     or     He (or She) *am* I.     or
Him (or Her) am I.     (I don't think "Him (or Her) *is* I." would ever 
occur, or that it would ever occur to anyone to think it should.)

But because this "it" is *not* the personal pronoun "it", this set of 
options doesn't have any active proponents.

H o w e v e r ,  as far as whether English "ever used anything other than
SVO or SOV in common phrases", if I am correct in assuming that "common" 
here refers to normalness(!), not to actual statistical frequency of 
specific wordings in real-world use, then of *course* it has.  Consider

   New York, San Francisco, New Orleans -- I've seen them all, done them all
   ... but {Chicago I've managed to avoid} throughout the course of a 
   long and productive life.

   {Your penchant for convoluted sentence production I've always envied}, 
   but I've never managed to bring myself to imitate it.

These {the parts in fancy brackets} demonstrate OSV, don't they?  Of 
course it's possible (for many people perhaps more normal) to recast them 
in SVO, but I think OSV occurs fairly frequently in real life in 
constructions like these.

One last thing.  "I thee wed" is not exactly what I would call a "common
phrase".  It's a fossil, used *only* (as far as I can imagine) in the 
wedding service.  I don't think the pattern is productively available except
in humorous allusion to weddings ("With this gun I thee shoot" etc.).

--
Liland Brajant ROS'                "Sed krom se iuj el la  homoj  malsategas,
P O Box 30091                      kiel do la socio povas posedi strukturon?"
Seattle, WA 98103 Usono            -Gulivero (Ted Danson) en la nova televida
Tel. (206) 633-2434                 versio,  citita  en  "Baptist Peacemaker"
