When is it correct to use "... and I" as in "Steve and I"?

Could someone please tell me when it is correct to use "... and I".
Example when this has been used is "John and I will rebuild the PC".

Can someone please advise when it is correct to use "... and I" and when it isn't correct to use it?.

Thank you.
Regards,
Ian.

[Clare James]

You can use it when it's the subject of the sentence.

So, for example, 'John and I bought a dog.'
But 'The dog bit John and me.'

In the first sentence 'John and I' is the subject of the sentence.
In the second sentence 'John and me' is the object of the sentence.

[riverkid]

Originally Posted by IanBriz2007

Could someone please tell me when it is correct to use "... and I".
Example when this has been used is "John and I will rebuild the PC".

Can someone please advise when it is correct to use "... and I" and when it isn't correct to use it?.

Thank you.
Regards,
Ian.

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language notes that examples such as,

[23] i a. %The present was supposed to represent Helen and I, that was the problem.

c. %It would be an opportunity for you and I to spend some time together.

"so common in speech and used by so broad a range of speakers that it has to be recognized as a variety of Standard English ..."

[the symbol '%' is used by the CGEL "to mark constructions or forms that are restricted to some dialect or dialects"]

[2006]

riverkid
Why don't you put your one-person crusade for bad Englsh on hold, and give the rest of us a break.
Do you have some financial or other interest in CGEL?

[David L.]

Thank you, 2006.

[riverkid]

Originally Posted by 2006

riverkid
Why don't you put your one-person crusade for bad English on hold, and give the rest of us a break.
Do you have some financial or other interest in CGEL?

Dear 2006 & David L,

I have a vested interest in helping ESLs understand how language actually, really works and I can honestly tell you that the job has been made much much harder by those who simply repeat the same old things without offering any proof.

Gentlemen, please address the issues raised by the following people, academics all. Are they mistaken in their viewpoints? If so, how?

Grammar Puss - Steven Pinker

Probably no "grammatical error" has received as much scorn as "misuse" of pronoun case inside conjunctions (phrases with two parts joined by [and] or [or]). What teenager has not been corrected for saying [Me and Jennifer are going to the mall]?

The standard story is that the object pronoun [me] does not belong in subject position -- no one would say [Me is going to the mall] -- so it should be [Jennifer and I]. People tend to misremember the advice as "When in doubt, say 'so-and-so and I', not 'so-and-so and me'," so they unthinkingly overapply it, resulting in hyper-corrected solecisms like [give Al Gore and I a chance] and the even more despised [between you and I].

But if the person on the street is so good at avoiding [Me is going] and [Give I a break], and even former Rhodes Scholars and Ivy League professors can't seem to avoid [Me and Jennifer are going] and [Give Al and I a chance], might it not be the mavens that misunderstand English grammar, not the speakers? The mavens' case about case rests on one assumption: if an entire conjunction phrase has a grammatical feature like subject case, every word inside that phrase has to have that grammatical feature, too. But that is just false.

[Jennifer] is singular; you say [Jennifer is], not [Jennifer are]. The pronoun [She] is singular; you say [She is], not [She are]. But the conjunction [She and Jennifer] is not singular, it's plural; you say [She and Jennifer are], not [She and Jennifer is.] So a conjunction can have a different grammatical number from the pronouns inside it. Why, then, must it have the same grammatical [case] as the pronouns inside it?

The answer is that it need not. A conjunction is just not grammatically equivalent to any of its parts. If John and Marsha met, it does not mean that John met and that Marsha met. If voters give Clinton and Gore a chance, they are not giving Gore his own chance, added on to the chance they are giving Clinton; they are giving the entire ticket a chance. So just because [Al Gore and I] is an object that requires object case, it does not mean that [I] is an object that requires object case. By the logic of grammar, the pronoun is free to have any case it wants.

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articl...wrepublic.html

The Decline of Grammar

Geoffrey Nunberg

...

Most of my fellow linguists, in fact, would say that it is absurd even to talk about a language changing for the better or the worse. When you have the historical picture before you, and can see how Indo-European gradually slipped into Germanic, Germanic into Anglo-Saxon, and Anglo-Saxon into the English of Chaucer, then Shakespeare, and then Henry James, the process of linguistic change seems as ineluctable and impersonal as continental drift. From this Olympian point of view, not even the Norman invasion had much of an effect on the structure of the language, and all the tirades of all the grammarians since the Renaissance sound like the prattlings of landscape gardeners who hope by frantic efforts to keep Alaska from bumping into Asia.

Do You Speak American . What Speech Do We Like Best? . Correct American . Decline | PBS

U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 12.2, 2006
Distributed Morphological Mechanisms
of Pronoun-Case Variation
Jeffrey K. Parrott

...

2.2 Infamous Coordination Variation
As is well known to virtually every native speaker of English, pronominal
case forms vary inside of coordinate phrases. This variation is a perennial
target of prescriptivist ire, and “errors” are harshly stigmatized. Scornful
social attitudes toward pronoun-case variation are illustrated in almost any
prescriptive usage guide.

The linguists are at least forthright in their rejection of linguistic morality. Their opponents, the defenders of traditional values, are more deceptive. They talk a great deal about morality, but in millenarian tones, as if the rules of grammar were matters of revealed truth rather than the tentative conclusions of thoughtful argument.

Do You Speak American . What Speech Do We Like Best? . Correct American . Decline | PBS

Simon is particularly shrill, but other writers on the state of the language are equally dogmatic. Edwin Newman and Richard Mitchell (the "Underground Grammarian") write books about the language that rarely, if ever, cite a dictionary or a standard grammar; evidently one just knows these things.

William Safire is a different story. Affable and self-effacing ("I may not know much about grammar, but . . ."), he brings out of the woodwork readers who are less frequently snobs than enthusiasts, who exchange with him schoolmarm maxims and scraps of linguistic folklore. These are word-lovers who live to catch out the mighty in a misused whom ; though their zeal is commendable, their authority is suspect.

Do You Speak American . What Speech Do We Like Best? . Correct American . Decline | PBS

LANGUAGE LOG
Language Log: "Everything is correct" versus "nothing is relevant"
January 26, 2005
"Everything is correct" versus "nothing is relevant"

G Pullum

And none of the foregoing has anything to do with prescriptive claims about grammar, which are a whole different story. Prescriptivists claim that there are certain rules which have authority over us even if they are not respected as correctness conditions in the ordinary usage of anybody. You can tell them, "All writers of English sometimes use pronouns that have genitive noun phrase determiners as antecedents; Shakespeare did; Churchill did; Queen Elizabeth does; you did in your last book, a dozen times" (see here and here for early Language Log posts on this); and they just say, "Well then, I must try even harder, because regardless of what anyone says or writes, the prohibition against genitive antecedents is valid and ought to be respected by all of us."

To prescriptivists of this sort, there is just nothing you can say, because they do not acknowledge any circumstances under which they might conceivably find that they are wrong about the language. If they believe infinitives shouldn't be split, it won't matter if you can show that every user of English on the planet has used split infinitives, they'll still say that nonetheless it's just wrong. That's the opposite insanity to "anything that occurs is correct": it says "nothing that occurs is relevant". Both positions are completely nuts. But there is a rather more subtle position in the middle that isn't. That is the interesting and conceptually rather difficult truth that Zink does not perceive.

{all bolded and underlined portions are my own added emphasis]

[David L.]

A man like Hitler became the head of state in Germany. How many other unknowns drew on Mein Kampf to justify their own brands of psychopathy in their own lives at the time, or rode on Hitler's wake? The sadistic school teacher, the medical practitioner whose Hippocratic Oath went out the window as the first Jew was dragged in for experimentation. Motives speak more volumes than all the words uttered in bluster.
Radicals, iconoclasts, and some downright dangerous people will also be found in academia. I recall Timothy Leary was one such academic, and what he wished young Americans to believe and act on! Such people have no greater pleasure than pure destructiveness, and shitting on the 'establishment'.
Chamberlain may have entertained 'debate' with Hitler with his "Peace in Our Time" reassurances from him, but fortunately, Churchill knew what he was dealing with and his motives, and knew better than to waste his breath. Notwithstanding that some academics are as vociferous as yourself, Riverkid, and can be called upon so selectively to add puff to your sails in this forum, I prefer to take the Churchillian approach.

[riverkid]

Some interesting ideas about the world at large, David, but I doubt very much whether it could ever be termed a defence of your position.

Take a look at the CV's for these people and I'm sure you'll agree that they are of the Churchillian variety. Churchill is after all, the one who "up with silly rules would not put".

Curriculum Vitae

Geoffrey K. Pullum: Home Page

Here's a sampling from a book review of

A Student's Introduction to English Grammar
Rodney Huddleston + Geoffrey K. Pullum
Cambridge University Press 2005

And there are occasional "prescriptive grammar notes" in side boxes — these are not prescriptive injunctions, but rather describe ways in which common prescriptivist rules are misguided or just plain wrong.

Huddleston and Pullum draw on the latest research, having "frequently found that pronouncements unchallenged for 200 years are in fact flagrantly false".

A Student's Introduction to English Grammar (Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey Pullum)

[rewboss]

Originally Posted by riverkid

I have a vested interest in helping ESLs understand how language actually, really works

I doubt that you personally have anything to gain from this, so it's a bit rich claiming you have a "vested interest", unless 2006 is spot on with his/her question about financial gain.

One purpose of Ask a Teacher is to help ESLs perform to the satisfaction of teachers and examiners, and to write in a style of English that would be accepted by the most traditionalist of readers who may well be possible employers. Deluging them in a mass of further, more subtle rules and screenfuls of linguistic theory, far from "helping them understand how language really works", is merely going to cloud the issue and is actually making our task a lot harder. You may disagree with examination boards, schoolteachers and textbooks, but that is no excuse to make it harder for people to get the exam results they deserve and need.

David L: Please don't draw comparisons with Hitler. It's considered to be extremely bad taste, and strictly against the rules of netiquette.

[riverkid]

Originally Posted by rewboss

I doubt that you personally have anything to gain from this, so it's a bit rich claiming you have a "vested interest", unless 2006 is spot on with his/her question about financial gain.

+++++++++++++++++
Cambridge Dictionaries

vested interest
noun [C]
a strong personal interest in something because you could benefit from it:

Cambridge Dictionaries Online - Cambridge University Press

++++++++++++++++

What I described as a "vested interest" need not have anything to do with financial gain. I hope you have now gained something from exposure to this situation.

The benefit I derive is solely a personal one, Rewboss. I could ask you what benefit you derive from being a moderator for this site; are you on the payroll of prescriptivists?, but that would be counterproductive so I won't go there.

Originally Posted by rewboss

One purpose of Ask a Teacher is to help ESLs perform to the satisfaction of teachers and examiners, and to write in a style of English that would be accepted by the most traditionalist of readers who may well be possible employers. Deluging them in a mass of further, more subtle rules and screenfuls of linguistic theory, far from "helping them understand how language really works", is merely going to cloud the issue and is actually making our task a lot harder. You may disagree with examination boards, schoolteachers and textbooks, but that is no excuse to make it harder for people to get the exam results they deserve and need.

"One purpose", the old red herring. From me, students get the full picture. Explaining how language works in all the registers of English doesn't mean that descriptive grammar excludes what's needed for formal writing. Needless to say, that "one purpose" is more than adequately covered here at UsingEnglish.

Most contributors don't actually know how to separate the various structures and collocations of English into the proper registers. How can it be considered a "subtle rule" to let students know that most adult speakers of the language strongly favor 'can' over 'may' for permission?

What is it about prescriptivists that makes them want to cling to ideas about language that are simply not followed? This is not a rhetorical question.

LGSWE

When it comes to describing differences across registers, native-speaker intuition is even less reliable. [than knowing which grammatical patterns are common and which are rare] ... most native speakers are not aware of the more pervasive differences in the use of core grammatical features. Yet most grammatical features are in fact distributed in strikingly different ways across registers.

ESLs often write in here because they come across conflicting information. Why is it conflicting? Because they have been given inaccurate information about how language works. Yet you would have us tell these students, and native speakers to boot, "to just never mind about these differences. Follow the prescriptions we give you".

I'm afraid that's a focus that is unnecessarily narrow and overly constraining.

++++++++++++
LGSWE

In LGSWE our approach is descriptive and, beyond that, also empirical.

++++++++++++++++++

"empirical" is NOT what prescriptive grammar is. It is highly subjective, and selective, focusing on a few issues that are perceived to be errors in language, but which clearly are not.