“This is she” vs. “This is her”

"My friend and I are going out"..

Personally, I think this whole discussion seems ludicrous. You don't like the rules? Deal with it. It is ridiculous to think that just because you have some bad habits, the rules of grammar must be changed to make speech more comfortable for you. I have always heard it said "this is she," and that is the right way of saying it. People who say otherwise are poorly educated or just careless.

It is what a lot of speakers say, including well-educated speakers I know. Whether it is acceptable depends on the register and the attitudes of the speaker and listener.

I'm just talking about how native speakers use their language. There's no need to insult me.

The rule ignores the facts of usage. The fact is that native speakers do not say:

That's I.
The best swimmer is he.
The winners are we.

Some speakers of course do say these, but I'm claiming that if they do, they say them because they've been explicitly taught that these forms are "correct."

So the rule does not describe the facts of usage. So how useful is it?

A better rule might be something like this: The object pronouns (me, him, her etc) are the default.
"Me and my friend are going out."
"Who wants to go? Not me!"
"She is taller than me."

The subject pronouns (I, he, she etc) are only used in a few cases:

- as the single subject before the verb: "I am going out."
Repeat the pronoun for emphasis, and it revert to object form: "Me, I am going out."

- in certain compound constructions after a preposition, for instance "between you and I".

Insisting that nominative pronouns must follow 'be' ignores what "fact"? The "fact" that it sounds absurd to you? It doesn't sound absurd to me, so is it still a "fact"?

Jennifer is right. Just because something sounds funny doesn't make it absurd or snobbish or wrong. When it sounds funny, check out the rules. If you don't like the answer, too bad.

People don't like to find out that something they're accustomed to is technically wrong. So what's the reaction? Declare the rules are wrong and decide that what sounds right to them is correct. So we all now have our own personal grammar rules.....great! Grammatical Relativity.

Jeez - have some humility!

It's inaccurate and confusing, particularly steps 3 and 6.

STEP 3: Turn a sentence around if you are confused about whether a pronoun is the subject or object: "The best swimmer is him." "Him is the best swimmer." (Wrong) "The best swimmer is he." (Correct)

STEP 6: Answer "This is he (or she)" when you identify yourself on the telephone: Caller 1: "Is Lucy Peters there?" Caller 2: "This is she." ("She is this," not "Her is this.")

In following these rules, I'll end up saying absurd things like:

"Who's that in the picture? - That's I."
"Who are the winners? - The winners are we."

To insist that nominative pronouns must follow "be" is to ignore the facts.

Mofei,

The latter part of your response (a, b, c) really made me laugh...beautiful!

Great posts from everyone!

And here I thought when I did a Google search on this topic, nothing would come up!

Now, I will leave things at that/this (whole new topic? which one is it? "that" or "this"?) and not to get into a discussion over my usage of the word "And" to start a sentence.

Goodness, English can be a headache ;)

The last comment from goofy is absolutely right. If "This is she" is grammatical (as the Chicago Manual of Style says) then it isn't consistent with general usage of the verb "be". I suppose you could call it an idiom, or more likely, snobbery.

English is a Germanic language, and in general Germanic languages take the nominative case for the object (sometimes called predicate) of the verb "be". Modern German does for all objects of "be", not just pronouns.

Old English did this too, but in the middle ages, English started to change under the influence of French and started using the accusative (me, her, him, us, them) after "be" instead of the nominative (I, she, he, we, they).

If it was true that modern English took the nominative after "be", we would say things like "That's they over there" or "The man who murdered Poirot is he!".

So if anyone tries to tell you that "This is she" is really their natural way of speaking ... they
a) have been dead for several hundred years
b) are a snob
c) have had this rule shoved down their throat by a snob

Then why do I never say "That's I"?

When am I supposed to use the subject case pronouns after "be" and when am I supposed to use the object case? The "rule" is impossible to follow.

The correct response is "This is she". "Is" is a linking verb and so the complement is subjective not objective. "This is she" is not used very often and because of that it sounds funny. Just because it sounds funny does not mean it is incorrect.

"This is her" is correct, because the only people who say "This is she" are people who have been told a rule that's based on one or both of two rules:
1. Language is math.
2. English is a different language.
Languages don't always make sense analytically. Fortunately, they don't have to.

I am almost certain that the correct phrase is "This is she". This is because you can ask, "May I please speak TO her?" but in that case, you are using it directly. I like to swap the phrase making it "she is this" or "she is who is speaking" and it just makes more sense, yes?

If we follow the prescription that we must use nominative (or subject) case after "be", we get ridiculous things like this:

"Here's a photo of my old hockey team."

"Which one of these players is you?"

(pointing) "Oh, that's I."

I should have said that no one in my part of the world says "this is she." I know that many people do say it. But even for those people, using the subject case after "be" is only used in a restricted set of cases.

I have been criticized for saying "Is that her?" or "that's her"...and further criticized for saying it's 'common usage'.

I do say "this is she" as a phone response - but saying "is that she?" just doesn't sound right????

Jennifer,
You obviously have to use some judgment. You might not want to use slang just because everyone else is using it. But I don't see how using the English you hear everyday means that no one would understand you. Do you not understand the English you hear every day?

Everyone around me says "this is her." No one says "this is she." If the traditional rule differs from what people say, that tells me that something is wrong with the rule, not the speakers.

Determining if something is right or not by whether a lot of people you know use it is ridiculous. If I used all the terrible English I heard everyday no one would understand a word I said, way to aim low!

Scott, why are you using Latin as an example?

Lots of people say "this is her". Some people (altho not in my part of the world) say "this is she". They are both acceptable

I think these questions are a good way to determine if something is "right" or not: "do I say it in normal speech?" and "is it understandable?"

An interesting note:

In Spanish, it is common to respond "soy yo" which means "I'm me".

Avrom, here is an allegedly complete list of english copula:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_copulas

Note, none of them seem to allow a sentence with the same me/I, him/he her/she issues to be constructed.

Is "to be" the only copulative verb in English? It sure seems like it; I can't think of another that works this way.

Note that members of the contrast class to this really shouldn't be called "action" verbs, because not all of them *do* describe what an object does. Consider the verb "to have." There's no sense in which this describes an action, but it definitely takes accusative, not nominative, case:

I have her and she has me.
*I have she and she has I. (Unless you're Tom Lehrer.)

Or, as Dan Quayle once said, "potatoe".

Potato Potaato

In traditional grammar, the "complement" of a linking (or copulative) very is called the "predicate nominative." Its name indicates the proper case. Subject and predicate nominative are identities. The predicate nominative indicates what the subject IS rather than what the subject DOES. This is the difference between an "action" verb and a "linking" verb.

Scott is correct, as is your second link from press.uchicago.edu.
More precisely, the verb "to be" is a copulative verb, not a transitive verb. As such, it connects not subject and object, but two noun phrases of the same case. see:

http://www.alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxitsmev.html

Interestingly, this doesn't mean that you always use the nominative form. The verb "to be" links nominative to nominative or accusative to accusative. As long as the noun on both sides uses the same form.

When you say "this is her/she," you are not implying the word "speaking." In fact what you are doing is equating yourself to the person for whom the caller is asking. If the caller is asking for Sarah, one could accomplish the same thing by saying "I am Sarah." But instead you are replacing the word "I" with "this" and "Sarah" with the nominative pronoun, in this case "she."

If you still don't buy it, take latin for example (in latin, the rules about which words go in which cases (nominative/accusative/etc) are about smack-on to our own, but they are easier to see because of case endings.) In latin, Sarah would say "ego sum sara" or "I am sarah", and the same grammatical markings would appear on "haec est ea" or "this is she."