This is a follow-up to my post on the difficulty of asserting “correct” English grammar. I think it is an example that will both illustrate the point I was trying to make and also be of interest to more of my friends–and it contains a reference to Hebrew grammar as well!
Consider the phrase, “She is taller than me.” The word than is a conjunction, it connects two parts of a sentence. The only verb in the phrase is is, and that is an intransitive verb, meaning it does not take an object. The word me is a pronoun specifically in the accusative case–meaning it is used as the direct or indirect object of a verb or preposition. All that is a fancy way of saying that technically, me in this phrase is grammatically incorrect. You can test this very easily by the simple addition of one word. If you filled the phrase out a bit more, you would say, “She is taller than I am.” The addition of that word am makes it crystal clear that the pronoun has to be in the nominative case. It is very unlikely that you would say, “She is taller than me am.”
But at least in American English, it is almost unheard of for anyone to say, “She is taller than I.” It sounds stuffy, pedantic if you will. I would wager that a vast majority of speakers of American English would say, “She is taller than me.”
A prescriptive grammarian might label the common phrase “incorrect.” A descriptive grammarian simply notes and documents that the common phrase has become standard for the vernacular.
What is going on here? How did it happen that we learned to prefer what some grammarians consider to be incorrect? I don’t know if there has been any specific research on this, but I have a theory. I think that in the mind of the speaker, in the short phrase the word than has been converted from a conjunction to a preposition (and indeed, there are times when than is used a preposition). Prepositions take objects–consider “from me,” for example–and so it feels natural to use the accusative “me” in this context.
It’s possible that I have a sensitivity to this issue because of my experience teaching Hebrew. There is no conjunction equivalent to than in Hebrew. Instead, Hebrew uses the preposition min, meaning “from” to create the comparative degree. My students have to learn that in order to say “She is taller than I am” in Hebrew, they have to say, “Hee gavohah mimeni.” That literally translates to, “She taller from me.” And the word “me” in the Hebrew is in the accusative case, the object of the preposition min.
Getting back to English, I suppose you can get around the problem by always using the longer expression. But I doubt many people will choose that track. Instead, I think you’re going to find more and more people simply recognizing that “She is taller than me” is correct English.
2 Responses
This is funny, because my sister also commented to the effect that various journalists have these sorts of standards (and I don’t disagree!). But I think if you open your ears and listen for the way people speak, you’ll see that I’m right about the relative frequency. Think of how different the speech or writing might be if those journalists are quoting others!
I must have a different type of friends than you, Jack. Granted, many of my friends are former newspaper copy editors (from the days when every real newspaper employed multiple copy editors) or journalism teachers, but I think nearly all of my friends would say or write “taller than I am.” But I agree with your point that most U.S. native English speakers today would use the object form.