"Us" as nominative in English nominalized clauses

[Ithisa]

I just sent this skype message to my friend: "i can imagine the horror: we watching films, i'm crying or otherwise intently watching, while u absentmindedly munch on stuff" and I realized that "we" sounded weird. People seem to use "us" here.

Why? Isn't "we" the subject of the embedded nominalized verb phrase "we watching films"? Why is there an intuitive urge to use "us" here? What rule is "we" subconsciously violating?

[Thakowsaizmu]

It actually does sound off to me. "we are watching films" or "us watching films" both sound 'correct' to me, but "we watching films" does sound odd. Then again, I made peace with English marking topics a long time ago, so something like "me and my Girlfriend, (we) went to the movies last night" is perfectly natural for me.

Anyway, I think that the rule here that is being subconsciously violated is the topic vs subject rule that I think isn't really discussed that much in English (or even taken seriously from what I understand).

[Dormouse559]

The phrase sounds correct to me with either "we" or "us", but I analyze it as different parts of speech with one form or the other. "We watching films" is just a shortened version of "We are watching films". But "Us watching films" is a noun phrase. I'd either keep "we", or use "us" and change the other subject pronouns to their "disjunctive" forms (with some other adjustments to work with noun phrases instead of clauses).

"i can imagine the horror: us watching films, me crying or otherwise intently watching, and u absentmindedly munching on stuff"

[Thakowsaizmu]

"We watching films" is just a shortened version of "We are watching films". But "Us watching films" is a noun phrase.

For me, I would never drop the "are" in an instance like that. At least, it is not how my dialect works. "We watching films" would, not nested, be standard in AAVE, but not as much in GA. And even in a sentence like the OP's example, it still sounds more natural to change it to either "us watching" or "we are watching". But that is for my dialect.

[Dormouse559]

For me, I would never drop the "are" in an instance like that.

Neither would I … unless I wanted to simulate AAVE. So it's not correct in my dialect, but it doesn't feel wrong either.

[Ithisa]

"We watching films" in that context was meant to be a noun phrase. My question is again: why do we inexplicably use the accusative for the subject of a noun phrasified verb phrase?

On the other hand, "us watching films" seems to mean something very different from the much easier-to-parse noun phrase "our watching films". What is it really? Syntactically in my message, it seems like it isn't a traditional noun phrase (replacing with noun causes a syntax error), but it is a phrase that isn't a verb phrase so...?

[DanH34]

I speak a dialect in which 'us' is replaced with 'we' in most cases ("Are you watching films with we?"), and even we would use 'us' at all times in the example given.

I'd never noticed that before; it's weird.

[Alomar]

The way I analyze this is that "us" is the object of imagine. "I can just imagine it. Us..." Is simply stylistic to me. It could be said instead "I can just imagine us..." So then "watching movies" is a complement to us.

[Ithisa]

But syntactically,

Code: Select all

I can imagine us (watching movies)

is not the intention. The intention is

I can imagine (us watching movies)

I'm starting to think this might be an explanation though. Perhaps the accusative in English has devolved to the point where it is not actually used for objects, but for noun words that happen to follow verb words regardless of their relationship (although usually that means the noun is the object of the verb, but not if certain things go after the noun).

[basilius]

Perhaps the accusative in English has devolved to the point where it is not actually used for objects, but for noun words that happen to follow verb words regardless of their relationship (although usually that means the noun is the object of the verb, but not if certain things go after the noun).

(Color markup added by me)

Why do you think this usage is a recent innovation?

Why do you think this happens only when the pronoun + participle group follows the verb?

[Ithisa]

It's because I think the phenomenon arose due to garden-path sentences. The nouns are declined with the initial incomplete parse, which gives incorrect local case information as something near the end requires a reparse. "Imagine us watching movies" is the way it is because when people try to express the idea, it goes "IMAGINE 1STP-PRON...". At this point, assuming the sentence ends here, the form to use is obviously "us". On the other hand, "Imagine we watching movies" sounds wrong because "imagine we..." instinctively triggers the brain to parse it as an independent sentence with a wrong case on "we".

Compare "Imagine a situation involving us watching movies". The brain does not want to backtrack to validate the "us", so the case used must be the case that makes sense in "Imagine a situation involving (we/us)." On the other hand, when the sentence cannot terminate at the pronoun due to a syntax error if a period is thrown there, there is no pressure for a garden-path influenced parsing: "Imagine that we watch movies". "Imagine that us" is wrong, so there is no pressure to change the large-scale syntactically correct "we" to "us".

There seems to be many examples of this in English due to its awkward syntax leading to many garden-path sentences, although only the case with pronouns seems to be widely accepted as prescriptively correct. Consider: "everybody who is part of the hockey players *love coffee". The technically incorrect *love is used instead of *loves is because "hockey players love coffee" is locally correct while "hockey players loves coffee" is locally wrong.

This seems to be what you get for having simplified your grammar to the point declensions and conjugations don't carry any disambiguating power at all. In this case, people would not think "oh, this means the subject is singular" when they see -s on a verb, they will subconsciously use string-matching patterns such as "the nearest noun doesn't end in an -s", because they learn the rule only subconsciously through hammering in many example sentences as a baby. Most native speakers probably would need to think for quite a while before they can tell you what -s on a verb actually means.

[basilius]

That wasn't what my question was about.

Basically, I want to know if you've ever considered actually checking the implied claim that things were different in the past in the specific point being discussed.

I have some reasons to doubt the idea that nominative pronouns used to be more frequent in such contexts. But I haven't checked it myself.

Edit: Typical of me with my impeccable manners: I forgot to mention that I liked some points in your analysis; I am kinda curious about syntax models emphasizing more local/incremental aspects of utterance generation, compared to mainstream generativist analyses.

[Ithisa]

Well, prescriptivists always gripe over these things, and prescriptivism usually appeals to older forms (although some of them, like avoiding split infinitives, are simply invented out of thin air). At least no other Indo-European language I know abuses the accusative this way.

Actually, if I am to pick sides I am pretty much a generativist. In this case, English syntax can be described well by a context-free language. However, morphology in English seems to be based on low-level patterns of utterances around the word, and happens before the actual parsing into semantics. That is, people seem to apply -s to verbs before they even parse to the point of semantically understanding the subject.

English is a really messy language anyways. The Japanese already perfected an extremely mechanical translation algorithm from their language to/from Classical Chinese in the 9th century, intended for use by people knowing zero Chinese, that works better than Google Translate. (Rant: AI will take off much quicker if English weren't the global language. Almost all languages are easier to parse than English. And perhaps Mandarin Chinese.)

[Dormouse559]

Well, prescriptivists always gripe over these things, and prescriptivism usually appeals to older forms (although some of them, like avoiding split infinitives, are simply invented out of thin air). At least no other Indo-European language I know abuses the accusative this way.

You'll find that French disjunctive pronouns - moi, toi, lui, etc. - pattern nearly perfectly with English's use of accusative pronouns in non-accusative environments. And these pronouns are historically just stressed versions of the Latin accusative (and in lui's case, the Vulgar Latin dative). The difference is that no one considers them a sign of degeneracy. Why does French get a pass and not English?

I am happy. - Je suis heureux.
John and me are happy. - Jean et moi sommes heureux.

[basilius]

Well, prescriptivists always gripe over these things, and prescriptivism usually appeals to older forms (although some of them, like avoiding split infinitives, are simply invented out of thin air).

I didn't understand this argument... Are you rejecting the idea of checking whether or not the usage in question is indeed innovative because referring to older usage is a prescriptivist practice for you? I hope not :)

Actually, it seems to me that we watching films would be an innovation, if it's possible at all.

At least no other Indo-European language I know abuses the accusative this way.

????

To me, it looks like taken from Latin (and Greek).

In this case, English syntax can be described well by a context-free language.

Can it? (and I assume you meant context-free grammar, right?)

However, morphology in English seems to be based on low-level patterns of utterances around the word, and happens before the actual parsing into semantics.

Please explain this. What is "low-level patterns"? Do you mean that morphology has to be parsed before semantics can be processed? Do you claim that it's different with most other languages?

That is, people seem to apply -s to verbs before they even parse to the point of semantically understanding the subject.

Are you speaking of parsing or generating an utterance, or (??) of both?

The Japanese already perfected an extremely mechanical translation algorithm from their language to/from Classical Chinese in the 9th century, intended for use by people knowing zero Chinese, that works better than Google Translate.

What do you mean? The kana morphological markup (I forget the term) applied to texts in Kanbun? How does it count as a translation?

(Rant: AI will take off much quicker if English weren't the global language. Almost all languages are easier to parse than English. And perhaps Mandarin Chinese.)

Why do you think so? Most languages have more complex morphologies, and very few have a word order as rigid as English; neither complex morphology nor freer word ordering seem to be helpful in machine parsing. Or did you mean something different?

[Trailsend]

You can tease a couple of interesting things out of this sentence (and variations of it). I'm going to replace the "you" with "he" because it makes it more visibly interesting.

I can imagine the horror: us watching films (1), i'm crying or otherwise intently watching (2), while he absentmindedly munches on stuff (3)

I can imagine the horror: us watching films, me crying or otherwise intently watching, while he absentmindedly munches on stuff

I can imagine the horror: we're watching films, I'm crying or otherwise intently watching, while he absentmindedly munches on stuff

*I can imagine the horror: us watching films, i'm crying or otherwise intently watching, while him absentmindedly munches on stuff

I can imagine the horror: us watching films, me crying or otherwise intently watching, him absentmindedly munching on stuff

Note that the accusative form shows up in all the phrases that don't have finite verbs. Replace "munches" with "munching" (which requires removing "while"), and immediately you need "him" instead of "he". Similarly, throw a copula into phrases (1) or (2), and you have to use the nominative instead of the accusative.

Without putting too much thought into it, my first hypothesis would be that this is related to a raising-to-object structure, like Alomar said, except that I'm not convinced the embedded phrases are the objects of "imagine". However, they are certainly non-finite clauses, which I would guess is what triggers the accusative case. (As shown above, when you make them finite clauses, you get the nominative back.)

[Valosken]

I think "us" in this context is being used as an object of the main verb - the continuous participle is the only reason you infer nominative.

[Lambuzhao]

I just sent this skype message to my friend: "i can imagine the horror: we watching films, i'm crying or otherwise intently watching, while u absentmindedly munch on stuff" and I realized that "we" sounded weird. People seem to use "us" here.

Why? Isn't "we" the subject of the embedded nominalized verb phrase "we watching films"? Why is there an intuitive urge to use "us" here? What rule is "we" subconsciously violating?

Valosken isn't too far off. But there is an important ellipsis in the phrase above:

I can imagine the horror of bodies strewn about,
I can imagine the horror of children blown to bits,
I can even imagine the horror of grotesque shells of skin and bones munching on one another in hopeless satisfaction of gnawing unsatisfiable hunger....

It's that "of" was blipped out. "Us" is the object not of the verb (directly), but of the noun horror. If it goes back to PIE, it's that old genitive with nouns/adjs of fearing, etc. The word "of" is understood in that position, without needing to be said, thus, no apparent lack of intelligibility. It's similar to the "you" understood in English imperatives. Those who say that the "us" is truly Objective/Accusative, well...objective insofar as its the object of a preposition.

As Valosken rightly suggests, the rest is a participial construction that modifies the "us".

I can imagine the horror of us watching films, of me crying or otherwise intently watching, while u absentmindedly munch on stuff.

Crazy gringos
of whom I am one

[Lambuzhao]

The audio daily double question:

It's the grammatical case for "you" , in this version of the sentence in question:

I can imagine the horror of us watching films, of me crying or otherwise intently watching, and you absentmindedly munching on stuff.



Final Jeopardy:

It's the preposition that's missing (but understood) before the "you' in the sentence above. (2 possible answers I can think of).

[CMunk]

This: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusative_and_infinitive

And it so happens, that it works with gerunds too in English.