Eighteenth-century grammarians such as
Joseph Priestley justified the colloquial usage of subject complements in instances such as
it is me (and
it is him,
he is taller than him, etc.) on the grounds that good writers use it often: All our grammarians say, that the nominative cases of pronouns ought to follow the verb substantive as well as precede it; yet any familiar forms of speech and the example of some of our best writers would lead us to make a contrary rule; or, at least, would leave us at liberty to adopt which we liked best. Other grammarians, including Baker (1770), Campbell (1776), and
Lindley Murray (1795), say the first person pronoun must be
I rather than
me because it is a
nominative that is equivalent to the subject. The opinions of these three partisans of the nominative case were accepted by the schoolmasters. However, modern grammarians such as
Rodney Huddleston and
Geoffrey K. Pullum deny that such a rule exists in English and claim that such opinions "confuse correctness with formality". This argument for
it is I is based on the model of Latin, where the complement of the finite copula is always in the
nominative case (and where, unlike English, nominative and
accusative are distinguished
morphologically in all nominal parts of speech and not just in pronouns). The situation in English may, however, also be compared with that of French, where the historical accusative form
moi functions as a so-called
disjunctive pronoun, and appears as a subject complement (''c'est moi'', 'it is me'). Similarly, the clitic accusative form can serve as a subject complement as well as a direct object (''il l'est'' 'he is [that/it]', cf. ''il l'aime'' 'he loves it'). Fiction writers have occasionally pointed out the colloquialisms of their characters in an authorial comment. In "The Curse of the Golden Cross", for example,
G. K. Chesterton writes, "'He may be me,' said
Father Brown, with cheerful contempt for grammar." And in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
C. S. Lewis writes, "'Come out, Mrs. Beaver. Come out, Sons and Daughters of Adam. It's all right! It isn't Her!' This was bad grammar of course, but that is how beavers talk when they are excited." == References ==