Nonetheless, in Indo-European languages that mark case explicitly, both are characteristically in the nominative case.
Traditional English grammatical terminology reflects that: in the sentence "Barack Obama is the president of the United States," the first noun phrase is called the "subject" and the second is called the "predicative nominative." It is never called the "direct object."
Now, I suppose you could say that in that sentence, we have [subject] is [predicate nominative], but that in the sentence "It's the president!" we have [subject] is [direct object]; but it makes more sense to me to say that all sentences with "to be" have the former structure, regardless of whether the subject's reference is known or unknown, and that English has generalized "me" to be used for predicate nominative functions as well as subject functions.
I'd also note the English sentence "Who is she?" as one that still takes the standard nominative case, even though the subject not only is an unknown but is an explicit marker of its being unknown! So even if we accept your argument that "me" is a direct object, your explanation for its being so in terms of the subject being unknown and thus "a different entity" seems questionable. Some other process is probably involved.
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no subject
Date: 2013-04-30 03:36 pm (UTC)Traditional English grammatical terminology reflects that: in the sentence "Barack Obama is the president of the United States," the first noun phrase is called the "subject" and the second is called the "predicative nominative." It is never called the "direct object."
Now, I suppose you could say that in that sentence, we have [subject] is [predicate nominative], but that in the sentence "It's the president!" we have [subject] is [direct object]; but it makes more sense to me to say that all sentences with "to be" have the former structure, regardless of whether the subject's reference is known or unknown, and that English has generalized "me" to be used for predicate nominative functions as well as subject functions.
I'd also note the English sentence "Who is she?" as one that still takes the standard nominative case, even though the subject not only is an unknown but is an explicit marker of its being unknown! So even if we accept your argument that "me" is a direct object, your explanation for its being so in terms of the subject being unknown and thus "a different entity" seems questionable. Some other process is probably involved.