4 ms·

The "brother and I" are a compound complement, not an object. Complements use the same form as the subject. Were is a form of "to be" which generally sees subje

The "brother and I" are a compound complement, not an object. Complements use the same form as the subject. Were is a form of "to be" which generally sees subject forms on both sides, such as "It is I". The only one who got it right was I. The only ones who got it right were he and I.

singlow 4y ago
I will also add that myself is only for a few specific cases, primarily when the subject and object are the same: I looked at myself in the mirror. She looked at me. I have decided to just be myself. Kind of an odd case there. I, myself, love to go to the movies. Here it is just used for emphasis, not as an actual reflexive pronoun. Some people do use the reflexive pronoun as an object in certain cases, often with compound objects, but it is not proper under any prescriptive English grammar that I have studied.
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naniwaduni 4y ago
> Were is a form of "to be" which generally sees subject forms on both sides, such as "It is I". I assure you, "it's me" is in far more general use than "it is I". The latter, and the purported rule that copular be takes two subjects, is at best exceptionally formal, and many English-speakers don't readily produce it in any context. Quick litmus test: check how acceptable the equivalent constructions are to you for "us" vs "we" or "them" vs "they": "The only ones who got it right were they." And then conjunctive compound NPs are clear as mud; you routinely run into otherwise impeccable speech where the governing rule seems to be that local euphony trumps long-range syntactic agreement. There's no good prescription here; there's a pretty wide range of pronoun conjunction constructions where you're going to want to either rephrase or just suck it up and let it sound intuitively wrong to somebody.
- singlow 4y ago
  I wouldn't correct someone for saying "It's me" in most contexts. But I will step right in and defend the person who says "It is I" and is told she is wrong.

singlow 4y ago

I will also add that myself is only for a few specific cases, primarily when the subject and object are the same: I looked at myself in the mirror. She looked at me. I have decided to just be myself. Kind of an odd case there. I, myself, love to go to the movies. Here it is just used for emphasis, not as an actual reflexive pronoun. Some people do use the reflexive pronoun as an object in certain cases, often with compound objects, but it is not proper under any prescriptive English grammar that I have studied.

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naniwaduni 4y ago

> Were is a form of "to be" which generally sees subject forms on both sides, such as "It is I". I assure you, "it's me" is in far more general use than "it is I". The latter, and the purported rule that copular be takes two subjects, is at best exceptionally formal, and many English-speakers don't readily produce it in any context. Quick litmus test: check how acceptable the equivalent constructions are to you for "us" vs "we" or "them" vs "they": "The only ones who got it right were they." And then conjunctive compound NPs are clear as mud; you routinely run into otherwise impeccable speech where the governing rule seems to be that local euphony trumps long-range syntactic agreement. There's no good prescription here; there's a pretty wide range of pronoun conjunction constructions where you're going to want to either rephrase or just suck it up and let it sound intuitively wrong to somebody.

singlow 4y ago
I wouldn't correct someone for saying "It's me" in most contexts. But I will step right in and defend the person who says "It is I" and is told she is wrong.