On “Between You and I” and Other Similar Case Anomalies

This paper investigates the usage of “between you and I” and other similar case anomalies, and proposes that this less-than-perfect grammatical form is the result of the interaction between so-called distance effect and case theory. Specifically, we propose that the pronoun “me” appears when it is syntactically distanced from an immediate nominative case-assigning position and that “I” appears when it is distanced from an immediate accusative/oblique case-assigning position. Thus, we have forms like “Me and my mom went to shopping” and “give Al Gore and I a chance.” We have used corpus data to show that this grammatically-intriguing phenomenon is not a hyper-correction or a frozen expression but results from the interaction of distance effect and case theory.