It may help to remind ourselves from time to time that grammar can help to make us not only better writers, but more discerning readers as well. When it comes time, for example, to read outside our contemporary world, putting ourselves in another time and place to see the world from another angle, we can unexpectedly encounter sentence constructions that strike us as strange, if not downright incomprehensible. If the author’s thought is important enough, though, we are compelled to try to understand the meaning, not guessing at it, but analyzing its grammatical form.

One such important author from another time in both American English and American literature is Ralph Waldo Emerson, the renowned transcendentalist who left us a legacy of outstanding thought regally expressed. Emerson lived across most of the nineteenth century (1803-1882), and his literary diction can at times be described as a poetic prose, a flourishing style meant often to evoke its meaning as much as state it outright. One of Emerson’s important essays is entitled “Intellect,” and midway through that piece, he wishes to make clear how what he calls the “constructive,” or artistic, intellect works. He has already told us in the essay that because all of us “have some access to primary truth, so all have some art or power of communication in their head, but only in the artist does it descend into the hand.” And then a few lines later appears this curious sentence: “The conditions essential to a constructive mind do not appear to be so often combined but that a good sentence or verse remains fresh and memorable for a long time.”

But that? What does that sentence mean, and how does that phrase help to construct, as Emerson might say, its meaning? Before we examine the grammar, let’s establish the idiom with another instance. More than one traditional grammar, for example, in discussing this same phrase quotes the English Romantic poet Shelley (early nineteenth century) as writing, “There is no doubt but that they are murderers.” Perhaps we can see the meaning here more readily (It is certain that they are murderers), but what is common to the construction of both Emerson’s and Shelley’s sentences might escape us at first: the independent clause of each is made up of some negative statement. Emerson’s “do not appear” and Shelley’s “there is no doubt” each in its way asserts a negative meaning; Emerson does so by directly negating the verb appear, and Shelley by affirming the noun doubt, whose logic is inherently negative.

Following these initial independent clauses, the phrase but that serves, then, to reverse the preceding negative meaning, so that each sentence is actually affirming something. We will first recognize the word but as a coordinating conjunction that marks opposition or contrariness of some kind between independent clauses (I looked for my watch, but I didn’t find it), but this same conjunction, when combined with the word that, creates a now outmoded two-word phrase which acts as a subordinating conjunction expressing positive exception or singularity. Emerson’s “but that a good sentence or verse remains fresh” means a good sentence or verse will remain fresh, just as Shelley’s “but that they are murderers” means that they certainly are.

So why did not Emerson and Shelley and so many other authors of an earlier time simply say positively what they wanted to say? Because meaning is sometimes made more stirring by not affirming that something is not the case—which means that it is, in fact, the case. The negative sense of the independent clause, in other words, undoes the negative inherent in the conjunction but; and the negative of a negative, rhetorically at least, is most often a positive. The essayist Emerson and the poet Shelley were artistic minds of high rhetoric, certainly, and sometimes the brilliance of insight must be safeguarded by a difficulty of access.

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Which of these sentences is grammatically correct: When you’ve finished the report, email a copy to Tom and myself, or When you’ve finished the report, email a copy to Tom and me. What is the difference, in other words, between myself and me in a sentence like this?

Both myself and me are pronouns, and English has quite a few species and uses of this basic part of speech. Grammarians have various ways to count and classify the pronouns, but every scheme begins with what is called the personal pronouns, and both myself and me are members of that class. A further distinction between simple and compound personal pronouns is often made. The difference between the two forms is obvious: the word me is composed of one element and is therefore simple; the word myself comprises two elements (my and self), and is therefore compound. There are many other personal pronouns, but let’s limit our discussion to these two at issue in the example sentences.

All of this, though, has to do with form, and we should remember in analysis that the form of a word is one thing, and its use is quite another. In order to revise our work confidently, we have to be able to account for both form and use when a question such as the one we’re examining here presents itself. If we focus, then, on the section of the sentence where the pronouns me and myself appear, we see at once that both are objects of the preposition to. That preposition has, in fact, two objects (Tom and myself or me), and we remember that the object of a preposition is always in the objective case. Both myself and me are indeed in the objective case, and so we can rule out a quick analysis of form to resolve our question.

We turn, then, to the grammatical use of each of these pronouns. Myself may be used as either an intensive or a reflexive pronoun. As an intensive, it emphasizes another word to which it refers: I myself read the report, or I read the report myself. In each of these sentences, the compound pronoun serves to highlight the subject, I, the first emphatically because of its adjacent position, the latter even more markedly so. As a reflexive, on the other hand, the pronoun myself must conform to a strict rule: a reflexive pronoun must refer to the subject of the clause in which it appears. If we look, then, at the first example sentence, When you’ve finished the report, email a copy to Tom and myself, the pronoun appears in the second clause, whose verb, email, is making a command. Such verbs are said to be in the imperative mood, and imperatives regularly omit their subject. Email a copy really means you email a copy; English includes the subject pronoun only for emphasis or clarification, and neither is needed here.

So does the pronoun myself serve either to emphasize or to reflect back on the subject of the verb of its clause? Emphatically not, and that, therefore, is reason enough—solid and cogent—to conclude that the first sentence is incorrect, no matter how many times we might hear such a construction. But why, then, is the second sentence grammatically correct? Let’s recall that the preposition to is governing the structure of this section of the sentence, and as a preposition, it must have an object. If the form me is correct (and it is), then its objective form marks it as a simple prepositional object. It refers logically to someone involved in the circumstances of the sentence, but that someone  is not the subject of the verb in the clause in which the pronoun me is involved. The clause merely commands someone to email the completed report to two people, Tom and me. The fact that the person represented by the pronoun me happens also to be the writer of the sentence (or issuer of the command) is grammatically irrelevant.

We have to keep, then, that grammatical requirements separate are distinct from the contextual logic of what we wish to communicate. Though grammar and logic complement each other as involved in the art of language, they each have their own domain, and each are due their distinct respect.

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What is the grammatical difference between I and me or we and us? Or I and my or we and our? All of these forms (and many more) have to do with what is called grammatical person and number. We are all familiar with the forms, but perhaps not with the topic to the degree we would otherwise wish. Here’s a quick review.

The term grammatical person refers to the fact that our everyday language tries to replicate the three-dimensional world we are alive within—at least as our minds construct it—and to find meaning and ideas within that same world of dimensions. English recognizes three persons (and that term extends to inanimate things as well), and calls them first, second, and third: the first person refers to the person speaking, the second person to the person spoken to, and the third person, the person spoke about. One difference between I and you and he (or she or it), then, is just that: first, second, and third person, respectively.

With this idea of grammatical person is associated the further idea of grammatical number. English recognizes two numbers, singular and plural, and so each singular grammatical person has its form to point to its corresponding plural: I and we, you and you, he (or she or it) and they. The person speaking, for example, may be either one or many, and so grammar refers to the first person singular or first person plural, and it does the same with the second and third persons. This is why we can refer to the narrative voice of a novel, for example, as written in the first person or third person (and there are examples of second person too). The singular number is usually assumed, but the singular person might be omniscient as well, meaning the narrator of the story knows what the characters might not.

Now there is another feature of these forms called case, which explains the further difference between I and me or we and us, together with many others forms as well (all the forms we are considering here are called personal pronouns). The term case refers to the way the grammatical function of a word in a sentence is expressed in either spelling or position. English works with three cases, and each has a set of grammatical functions it serves: the nominative case indicates the subject of a verb, the possessive case points to the possessor of something, and the objective case shows the object of a transitive verb or preposition. So, for example, we would analyze the pronoun they in the sentence They went to Los Angeles last week as third person plural, nominative case. In the sentence Their luggage was lost, the pronoun their is understood to be third person plural, possessive case (note the difference in spelling between the possessive pronoun their and the adverb there). And in the sentence I spoke to them the day they returned, the pronoun them functions as third person plural, objective case, as object of the preposition to.

This last example points to an especially frequent mistake in modern English, which we probably hear more often than we see written. The objective case, as we’ve noted, marks the object of both a transitive verb and of a preposition. Every preposition has an object (the two forming a prepositional phrase), and that object must (according to the traditional rules, as least) take the objective case. So we say to them, not to they. But we will often hear sentences like That’s the difference between you and I or She spoke to he and I about it yesterday. These are incorrect because both between and to are prepositions, and so should govern (as the traditional term has it) the objective, not nominative, case.

It’s not so much a matter of slavishly following rules as it is of honoring the integrity of the craft as it comes to us that all these observations apply. Change is both good and inevitable, but change must have its reasons as well.

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The best analysis finds simplicity at the heart of things: this is really just that. We analyze something not to have merely a thousand fragments, but to discover the system of what we’re looking at, a body of facts organized around a set of principles. That’s true with any science, including the science of grammar.

The grammar of prose, by which we mean the way the elements of an everyday sentence are connected to communicate a certain meaning, is built on the principle of assertion, the joining of one thing into some kind of association with another thing (the verb assert derives from a Latin verb that means exactly that, to join or claim). That is why the first step in analyzing a sentence is to identify the number of clauses it comprises, because each clause, the joining of a subject and verb, constitutes one thought; if we can understand each thought, or assertion, in itself, we can more easily understand the relationship of thought to thought within the same sentence and, more largely, within the same paragraph.

To illustrate this interconnection of elements in a prose statement, let’s look at a sentence I came upon recently. It is grammatically sound (with one questionable usage, as we’ll see), but it is not particularly well stylized, which will make it all the better as an example for grammatical analysis: The one trait which each hotel on my vacation shared was how poorly I slept while I was there. If we want to understand how this sentence is put together, in order to revise it, perhaps, into something better, where in the world would we begin? So many ideas seem to be whirling around that it’s difficult at first to find its center, or even its subject. But here is where we are to rely on the principle of simplicity, and analyze under the assumption that the bony grammatical structure is not as intricate as the neural network which carries the particular meaning of the statement.

After reading the sentence through again, we find these four verbs: shared, was, slept, and was. Three of them are part of subordinate clauses (shared in the relative clause which each hotel on my vacation shared; slept in the noun clause how poorly I slept; and was in the adverbial clause while I was there); that, then, leaves the first instance of was to be reckoned with as the main verb. If that assumption is true, then it’s likely we’re looking at a simple statement of identity, with a subject merely being equated with a noun in the predicate through the copula was. And that, in fact, is what we do find: the subject the one trait which each hotel on my vacation shared is being identified with the state or situation of how poorly I slept while I was there. The essential structure of this nineteen-word sentence, then, is simply subject + was + predicate, no more complicated ultimately than the hotel was a mess.

There remains, though, that questionable usage I mentioned earlier, and my guess is that this is what makes this sentence difficult at first sight. The predicate opens with the subordinate clause how poorly I slept, and that clause begins with the word how. We called this section a noun clause because it functions as a noun, even though its first word, how, is really an adverb. Traditional grammar says we can do this (we might easily say, for example, I saw how fast he was driving), but when the construction makes a statement unnecessarily complicated, a simpler design should be considered: The one trait which each hotel on my vacation shared was that I slept so poorly while I was there. By changing how to that, we are using the conjunction more regularly associated with a noun clause (as we often see in a sentence like I saw that he was busy), and by transferring the idea of degree originally in how to the adverb so, we have smoothed out the sentence without changing its simple structure. Still not a good sentence, but better.

And to look for simplicity of structure, no matter its elaboration in detail, should be our goal.

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Last week’s post, The Transitive View, brought this question from a student: “You say that the verb walked in the sentence I walked along the shore is intransitive because it has no direct object. But the subject did something at the shore, so why can’t we say that the noun shore is the direct object of walked, and therefore the verb is transitive?” This is a very common question on the topic of transitive verbs, and it arises from a subtle misrepresentation of the grammar. Let’s begin with a brief review of the notion of transitivity.

Most modern languages, I think it’s fair to say, are set up on the assumption that the world is a multiplicity. We are aware and awake in the world, but as we begin to fragment that experience with nouns and verbs, our awareness turns to consciousness, and the power of our mind sees things both as being what they are and as acting in some way, that is to say, taking on a role in a given circumstance and attempting to change that circumstance by doing something. Nouns name things and verbs say what those things are or do. The sentence I am a student identifies what the subject is, or exists as; but in the sentence I walked along the shore, the sentence is concerned not with saying what the subject is, but rather what it is doing.

If a verb acts directly on something (and the key to understanding this lies in the word directly), as the  verb read does in the example I read an interesting essay on space travel last week, that verb is termed transitive because its action is thought to go across from the subject directly into something other than the subject, the noun essay (or more completely, interesting essay). That noun is called the direct object of the verb, and all transitive verbs, by definition, have such a direct object. If, contrariwise, the action of a verb does not go directly across into something other than the subject, as in I walked along the shore, the verb is termed an intransitive verb. Intransitive verbs do not have a direct object.

But—to return to our opening question—why is the noun shore not a direct object? To answer that, we must remember that the art of language attempts, like all arts, to re-present (I use the hyphen deliberately) an experience we live, either actually or imaginatively. The reality behind the linguistic representation of I walked along the shore was that there wfas the subject I, there was a shore, and there was the act of walking—three things I experienced as one unified moment of reality as I lived it. But when I wish to re-present that singular moment in the art of language, with all its parts of speech and all the syntactical relationships among them, I am compelled to transpose the truth of the moment into a linguistic expression of it, and with that I am duty bound to follow the craft, the way, of language. The truth of what happened is one thing; its linguistic representation is quite another.

And that linguistic rendering requires me to cast my lived experience into the elements of language: words, phrases, and clauses. When I reflected on that moment and decided to communicate with subject and verb that I walked, I next decided to tell where I walked—not directly what I walked, but where. That made it necessary, then, to choose the appropriate preposition, along, and since all prepositions work with their own objects, I placed the noun shore with it to construct a prepositional phrase. That phrase in its entirety, then, stands as an adverb (called an adverbial phrase), and so we have the answer to our original question: the noun shore cannot be the direct object of walked—first because it does not say what I directly walked (as it would, for example, in the sentence I walked my dog), but where; and second because it functions already as part of a prepositional phrase. We can see the structure of the sentence in two parts: what the subject did and where it happened. The action did not have an object, but it did have a location.

That, at least, is the way our common language sees it, chopping up our every move with words and phrases.

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