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?
J.W. Brewer said,
October 9, 2025 @ 4:56 pm
The compound-pronoun subject in e.g. "me and them went different ways" or "me and them didn't think much of it" (to take two examples I just googled up) seems to my ear/eye unmarkable for an informal register. Maybe it's the order, since "them and me" as a subject may be rarer? ("them and me went to the Ct. House on that day, and layed our case before the provost Marshall" – from an 1865 letter written by a white Virginia farmer) "They and I" does seem a bit stiff and overformal.
Note that one can say "between them" without it having to be "them and Y," just like one can say "between us" and stop a sentence right there. Habituation to that usage may make "between they and Y" harder to pull off?
J.W. Brewer said,
October 9, 2025 @ 5:10 pm
Also (since the other examples I quoted may all have been American), "me and them didn't see eye to eye at all so we had a meeting and agreed to part" – from an interview with the British rock musician Huw Lloyd-Langton (1951-2012).
If indeed "them and me" is less common in subject position than "me and them," which seems plausible from casual googling (although there are of course lots of false positives that aren't subjects) it suggests that the sort of people who ignore prescriptive advice about pronoun case also ignore the prescriptive advice referenced in a prior thread to always put the first-person pronoun second to avoid being thought rude.
ktschwarz said,
October 9, 2025 @ 5:15 pm
Let's not forget that Arnold Zwicky has been writing about conjoined pronoun case for two decades, both here at Language Log and on his blog. See Zwicky's page for an overview, with a link to a Stanford honors undergraduate thesis on the topic that he supervised in 2006, and the bibliography from that thesis.
Let's also not forget that "between X and Y" is only the tip of the iceberg. Zwicky has collected tons of examples such as:
The frequency of "I" vs. "me" (or "she" vs. "her", etc.) different depending on which of these environments it's in and whether it's a first, second, or third person pronoun.
ktschwarz said,
October 9, 2025 @ 5:53 pm
More useful background, previously at Language Log: "He's a good guy, I like he and Callista" (said by Mitt Romney in 2012), with further links to Language Log and linguistics literature.
Jerry Friedman said,
October 9, 2025 @ 9:58 pm
On a previous occasion when this came up here, I found an example of someone using "me" as a conjoined subject and "I" as a conjoined object. I'm pretty sure it disappeared from the Web, so I'm not going to try to look for it. Here's your new example:
"This was an intense period for Josh and I, as there wasn’t much nightlife there so we spent the nights watching films, and making the trip to a huge supermarket in f**king Hue called Big C"
"Despite being told to stay indoors after 11pm, me and Josh would always get restless and explore the streets at night through boredom and needing to stimulate are brains and escape the 4 walls of our hotel rooms"
(There are examples of "Josh and I" as the subject too. I didn't try to see which the author used more.)
https://explorationat.wordpress.com/around-the-world-2/
Michael Watts said,
October 10, 2025 @ 12:33 am
That table seems perfectly compatible with the idea that the grammar of the modern language requires me in this context, and a heavy prescriptive effort has produced hypercorrections to I.
There is an obvious outlier among the corpora. Can we think of any reasons that "News on the Web" might be more prone to hypercorrection than the Corpus of American Soap Operas?
Separately, I don't understand why we're doing a comparison between so many different forms, but we're excluding the form myself, which is common as a way of not choosing between me and I.
(I'm not arguing for a 3×3 table crossing he/him/himself with I/me/myself. I'm arguing for a 2×3 table crossing he/him with I/me/myself. Omitting myself is leaving out a lot of relevant data.)
Philip Taylor said,
October 10, 2025 @ 5:01 am
"I think it was important for Jill and I to come now" (Michelle Obama, 2010) — in her shoes, I might well have said (and even written) exactly the same. "I think it important that both Lệ Khanh and I agree to the proposal […] " is, I believe, absolutely correct, so why does the change of "for" to "that" and the insertion of a "to" make such a difference ("I think it important for both Lệ Khanh and me to agree to the proposal […]") ? (Note: I fully accept that it does make a difference, but am having trouble explaining to myself exactly why …).
Y said,
October 10, 2025 @ 8:07 am
One significantly odd datum here is that in NOW, (she and I)/(her and I) = 0.12, but (he and I)/(him and I) = 0.73. This shows a specific excess of (her and I) in that corpus. In the other corpuses there is no obvious gender difference in those examples.
Jonathan Smith said,
October 10, 2025 @ 6:09 pm
@Philip Taylor it seems that "[it was] important for Jill and I to come now" etc. are ambiguous between readings where "for" is a preposition (cf. "important // to Jill and I~me // to come now") and ones where it's a subordinating conjunction (cf. "important // that Jill and I~me come now"). Of course normatively the former type should use "me" and the latter "I", but all bets are off given the data…
Michael Watts said,
October 10, 2025 @ 8:47 pm
I think you mean "that" to "for"?
The simple way to explain this is just to note that the form I is only used for the subject of a finite verb, and a clause introduced by for isn't finite. It's not so much that "the insertion of a to" forces a change in the form of the pronoun as that the use of for forces both a default-form pronoun and a marking of to on the verb.
That doesn't answer "why", but questions of this type don't really have "why" answers. That introduces a finite clause, and for doesn't. It's just a fact.
Michael Watts said,
October 10, 2025 @ 8:57 pm
Jonathan Smith, I don't think your observation is relevant at all. You can ignore the conjunction. It's always mandatory to say "It was important for me to come now"; I cannot be used within a for-clause. (Unless there's some kind of nested embedding that allows it, e.g. It was important for him to say that I [did something].)
If you read Philip Taylor's example sentence with for as a preposition, even though it is explicitly contrasted with that, then that requires me too. I'm not sure where you think ambiguity over pronoun form would occur. It just isn't the case that "the latter [type]" of sentence you describe in your comment should use "I".
Philip Taylor said,
October 11, 2025 @ 11:34 am
Just received the following as the signature (from a female British correspondent) to an e-mail :