More conjoined pronoun case counts
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In earlier posts and comments ("Between you and I"; "Barriers between you and I"), there have been many opinions about the possibility of various English subject and object pronouns in the two positions of "between X and Y". So I've done a quick tally of counts from five of the English-language corpora at English-Corpora.org:
Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)
News on the Web (NOW)
Corpus of American Soap Operas
The TV Corpus
The Movie Corpus
(Though for now I've tested only the patterns in which Y = I/me.)
| COCA | NOW | SOAP | TV | Movies | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| between her and I | 7 | 89 | 2 | 1 | 5 |
| between her and me | 35 | 119 | 29 | 47 | 16 |
| between she and I | 4 | 11 | 1 | 5 | 1 |
| between she and me | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| between him and I | 10 | 274 | 1 | 4 | 0 |
| between him and me | 84 | 411 | 53 | 76 | 64 |
| between he and I | 7 | 200 | 1 | 7 | 1 |
| between he and me | 0 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| between them and I | 5 | 120 | 1 | 2 | 2 |
| between them and me | 23 | 138 | 2 | 4 | 9 |
| between they and I | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| between they and me | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Overall, there's a fairly consistent pattern, though it's not yet clear to me how to explain it. As expected, things seem slightly different across corpora; and the choice of her/she vs. him/he vs. them/they seems to generate slightly different I/me results.
Obviously, it would also be a good idea to look at the data from EEBO.
Historians, data scientists and grammarians are welcome to go at it.
Bob Ladd said,
October 9, 2025 @ 1:10 am
One factor that hasn't been mentioned yet is pragmatic differences between subject and object uses of the "X and Y" combinations. "He and I" and "she and I", like "you and I", are both highly plausible as subjects; "they and I" much less so. The subject use means that the overall frequency of "he and I" and "she and I" in our linguistic experience is much higher than for "they and I", and somehow this carries over to when two pronouns are both objects of a preposition.
Jerry Packard said,
October 9, 2025 @ 5:49 am
Thanks for the data Mark. It seems Bob’s got it right. It looks like both constituents of the conjoined phrase take the oblique case as objects of the preposition, and that would change to nominative as sentence subject without the preposition. Am I missing something?