Depends on what you mean by “professional grammarians”. I know some linguists who would identify themselves as grammarians (since they research grammar), and it is patently false that any of them would consider “it is me” to be grammatically unacceptable.
If, on the other hand, you’re referring to people who are paid to make up grammar rules, then that’s like saying that the number 13 would be considered unlucky by most professional fortunetellers. Sure, maybe it’s true, but I’d rather hear from a mathematician when I want to learn about properties of numbers.
Actually, I do. When I research language, my underlying assumption is that logic underlies what often looks like chaos, and I want to find this logic. HOWEVER, I don’t try to impose logic on language by, for example, saying that predicative complements “should” be nominative.
When I receive a phone call and the caller asks for me by name, I reply “This is she.” That’s how I was brought up to speak. I also say “It is I” when that is the appropriate answer. (I’m a native English speaker.)
So, if we’re going by descriptive rules-- which, as I understand, are “however people use it”-- since there ARE people who use the subjective pronoun as a nominative predicate, isn’t it then equally correct to do so, or to use the objective?
I would say that it’s not very productive; the nominative in copulas only really exists in set phrases. My gut says that if more examples were found in unself-conscious speech, outside of those set phrases you wouldn’t find it. It’s hard to come up with many examples of those types of sentences, though - it just doesn’t come up very often. So this is, as I said, my gut - I can’t attest to it. I will reiterate though that it’s only something found in learned speech; it’s not something children do naturally - it still violates the basic structure of the language.
Frankly, and please don’t take this as an attack, but I wonder whether you really do consistently say “It is I”, as it’s definitely true that people are very unreliable when reporting on their own speech; you may simply not notice all the times you say “It’s me”. But perhaps you have internalized the rule completely - I couldn’t guess.
matt_mcl’s helpful translations into Spanish and French make me suspect that it might be a phenomenon related to pronoun-dropping. Many languages will drop subject pronouns - like Spanish - since verb agreement makes the subject clear. English or French, on the other hand, don’t drop them, since the verb is comparatively poor in morphology. The presence of a dummy pronoun, then - the English “it” and the French “ce”, which carry no semantic weight (look, for example, at “it’s raining” and the French “il pleut” versus the Spanish “llueve” - again, English and French have dummy pronouns that have no actual meaning but are required nonetheless), may condition the verb to take the third person forms rather than the first person like in Spanish (“soy” being the first person singular form of “ser”.) That would make the use of a pronoun that’s not a subject pronoun more appropriate, since the presence of a subject pronoun juxtaposed to a verb conjugated for a different person comes across as bizarre or ungrammatical. Just an idea that I just had - it may well not be accurate, but it would provide some sort of structural justification for the differences between languages.
Another argument against using subject pronouns with the complement of “be”: As I understand it, the idea basically is, since “be” is a copula, you are equating two things rather than one performing an action on another one; that is, neither pronoun is a direct object, so neither pronoun should be in the objective case.
But you’d think that since we already know that you can use objective pronouns with indirect objects, it would be easy to say “use the objective case with direct objects, indirect objects, and subject complements.” It’s easy to tell which one is the subject and which one is the complement: the verb already distinguishes between them, since it is conjugated to the subject, not the complement. We can’t say “It am I” (as in Spanish, “soy yo”) or, worse, “the victim am I” (“la víctima soy yo”).
Essentially, the “It is I” rule is a refusal to accept that there is such a thing as a subject complement, when really, it’s obvious from the fact that the verb is conjugated to one person and not the other.
Who’s going be in charge of the naked jello wrestling booth? I’m pretty sure that’s going to be I.
Hmm.
Corrvin, imagine that a door-to-door salesman came to the house and said, “Is Corrvin home?”
Would you respond with, “This is she”? Would that be a remotely appropriate response?
I seriously doubt it would. I think the “this is she” construction is an idiom peculiar to the telephone. I can imagine carrying it over into a few other media (e.g., instant messaging), but on the whole, it’s not a construction that admits to usage in a variety of contexts.
Zoe, aren’t you a retired English teacher? Please tell me that you didn’t force this rule on your students for so many years.
This sort of thing is why I wish the role of English teachers was clearer. Teaching students how to read analytically, to understand literature, to compose essays, to spell and punctuate properly, and things like that is extremely important. But those are not matters of English grammar and most English teachers have not actually formally studied grammar. It’s unfortunate that they’re tasked with teaching something that they don’t really formally learn about in their education.
As for “it is I/it is me”, does anyone else use the phrase differently depending on audience and context?
For instance: if there is a “who” phrase immediately following, then “It was me”/“It is me” still sounds wrong to me. Instead, I’d say “It’s I who will yadda yadda yadda.” Or: It was I who…etc.
But if someone is trying to find me in a crowded place and calls my name, I’m more apt to say “That’s me”. Similarly if someone says “Are you Spectre of Pithecanthropus?”
Oddly enough, that same thought occurred to me today while I was driving home from class. It underscores the questionability of native-speaker grammaticality judgments, though, because at this moment me sounds better: It was I who wrote the play we’re seeing and It was me who wrote the play we’re seeing both sound rather awkward, and I’m not certain what I actually say in spontaneous speech. (Though oddly enough, even though I use whom at least in writing and formal speech, It was me whom the dog bit strikes me as bizarre, while It was I whom the dog bit is only a little better. I think I would say It was me who the dog bit, though never It was I who the dog bit. I think I don’t like hearing me and whom juxtaposed that way.)
Goes to show that grammar is fuck-off complicated, anyhow.
I don’t see what’s absurd about this. If I were person A (cue B: You’re not!), that’s exactly how I would phrase that, and if I were person B, (cue B: Still not!), I would reconsider my understanding of hypotheticals (B: Hey!). Perhaps this example is poor simply because “you” is both the nominative and the objective form of the second person pronoun.
If it were like this, I’d tend to agree with you:
A: If it were I, I would…
which sounds a little stilted (but to me, certainly not wrong - in fact, it’s very likely that I’d say it like this) compared to:
A: If it were me, I would…
which sounds natural, but doesn’t match cases correctly.
