Edward Sapir (1884–1939). Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. 1921.
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in the sentence, determined by the syntactic relation of the word.
We need not go into the history of this all-important drift. It is enough to know that as the inflected forms of English became scantier, as the syntactic relations were more and more inadequately expressed by the forms of the words themselves, position in the sentence gradually took over functions originally foreign to it. The man in the man sees the dog is subjective; in the dog sees the man, objective. Strictly parallel to these sentences are he sees the dog and the dog sees him. Are the subjective value of he and the objective value of him entirely, or even mainly, dependent on the difference of form? I doubt it. We could hold to such a view if it were possible to say the dog sees he or him sees the dog. It was once possible to say such things, but we have lost the power. In other words, at least part of the case feeling in he and him is to be credited to their position before or after the verb. May it not be, then, that he and him, we and us, are not so much subjective and objective forms as pre-verbal and post-verbal 21 forms, very much as my and mine are now pre-nominal and post-nominal forms of the possessive (my father but father mine; it is my book but the book is mine)? That this interpretation corresponds to the actual drift of the English language is again indicated by the language of the folk. The folk says it is me, not it is I, which is “correct” but just as falsely so as the whom did you see? that we have analyzed. I’m the one, it’s me; we’re
Note 21. Aside from the interrogative: am I? is he? Emphasis counts for something. There is a strong tendency for the old “objective” forms to bear a stronger stress than the “subjective” forms. This is why the stress in locutions like He didn’t go, did he? and isn’t he? is thrown back on the verb; it is not a matter of logical emphasis. [back]
