For Our Personal Consumption ONLY:

It is Not Always the Case

Comparatives with “as” or “than

In the comparative sentences, many grammar books insist on using the subjective case after the
word “as” or “than”, noting that the complete comparative sentences actually consists of two
clauses, with “as” or “than” functioning as conjunctions:

He has many degrees as she has.—He has as many degrees as she.

HOWEVER, many modern grammars accept the common use of the objective case here,
arguing that in comparative constructions, the words “as” and “than” function as
PREPOSITIONS (even if the underlying phrase structure has as and than as conjunctions):

He has as many degrees as HER. His wife is smarter than HIM.

From: The UP Linguistics Manual by Dr. Jonathan Malicsi, UP Professor XII, Linguistics

**********

She is better at Math than me.(correct)

She is better at Math than I am. (correct)

From: Good English: Getting It Right by J. C. Ajmani

**********
ii) After than, we normally hear the object form (if no verb follows):

She’s not as good as HIM, but better than ME

BUT with a verb

She’s not as good as he is, but better than I am.

From: A Perfect Guide to English Grammar (A Self-Study Reference and Practice Book for
Advanced English Language) by Neil Johnson

**********
He is taller than I (am).

He is taller than ME. (This is now accepted). (High School English Grammar & Composition
by Wren and Martin)

“Than whom” is standard English today, admitted and blessed by the Oxford Dictionary.”
(Good English by G. H. Valins)
From: Applied English Grammar and Composition (Based on Nesfield, Wren & Martin &
Modern Oxford Authorities) by Dr. P. C. Das

**********

Now, why is English Grammar sometimes problematic?

“Grammars have been written in the west for over two millennia, and grammar writing in the
modern age carries its past with it. There is a burden of tradition on anyone writing a grammar, a
body of expectation that discourages innovation” (emphasis mine).

“The year 1586 is the annus mirabilis of English grammar writing, the year it all started. William
Bullokar published his Pamphlet for Grammar that year with the express intention of showing
that English grammar was rule-governed like Latin, something not generally assumed to be the
case. To counteract this widely held view, Bullokar modeled his English grammar slavishly on
the Latin grammar attributed to William Lily and prescribed for use in the schools by Henry
VIII, and the subsequent history of English grammar writing was one of gradual and hard-
won liberation from the shackles of Latin grammar.”

How is this historical fact connected to case as a feature in English Grammar?

“…nearly a century and a half later Lindley Murray is still having to cite grammatical authorities
to defend the fact that English does not exhibit the same case system as Latin and Ancient
Greek.”

From: English Grammar Writing by Andrew Linn in The Handbook of English Linguistics
edited by Bas Aarts and April McMahon

But what do common grammar textbooks intentionally ignore?

“Personal pronouns are definite and mostly animate and typically share any marking for animate
and/or specific objects. In some languages only pronouns bear objective case. English is, of
course, an example.”

“The history of English provides another example of a case system withering away. In Old
English there were four cases (nominative, accusative, genitive and dative) plus a vestigial
instrumental. The Old English case paradigms are strikingly similar to those of German, whether
old or Modern, but while German has lost only the instrumental from Old High German to
Modern German, English lost almost the entire system between the late tenth and thirteenth
century. With nouns only the genitive remained distinct from the nominative. With pronouns the
genitive was reinterpreted as a possessive adjective and a nominative–oblique distinction
remained, the oblique reflecting a merger of the accusative and dative.”

From: Case (Second Edition) by Barry J. Blake, Professor of Linguistics, La Trobe University

The traditional rule is logical and neat, and no harm can come from following it in formal
writing, but it often goes unobserved, especially in speech. The historical record shows that than
has been used as a preposition since the 1500s in sentences like John is taller than me. Recall
that in these cases the pronoun is in the objective case where the rule would require the
nominative. This construction appears in the writing of many canonical writers, among them
Shakespeare, Johnson, Swift, Scott, and Faulkner. Today, it occurs most commonly in first-
person narration and dialogue; it is relatively infrequent in formal expository and argumentative
prose, where the tendency (or perhaps, copyediting tradition) is to follow than with a clause (as
in taller than he is). Writers who would ignore the grammarian's rule should bear this in mind.
Constructions like taller than him have a colloquial or informal flavor

From: The American heritage guide to contemporary usage and style

Prepared by:

Francis B. Tatel