In the following inverted test sentence presented by an English grammar enthusiast on my Facebook page sometime ago, I picked “they” and not “them” as the correct pronoun: “The winners of the contests were (they, them).”
The grammar enthusiast then posed these intriguing questions: “If that’s the case, how many subjects are there in that sentence? Which is the subject and which is the predicate? (In such inverted sentences) we usually think of the subject as being in post-verb position. But according to inverse copular construction, the normal subject has inverted to a post-verb position, and the predicative nominal has inverted to the pre-verb position.”
To the first follow-up question, “How many subjects are there in that sentence?”, I replied that there’s only one—the entity described by the noun phrase “the winners of the contests.” The noun “winners” in this operative subject is modified by the phrase “of the contests,” and the predicate of that sentence is the pronoun “they,” linked to it by the linking verb “were,” which of course is the past-tense plural form of “be.”
IMAGE CREDIT: SLIDEPLAYER.COM, PREPARED BY S. IRIZARRYAs to the grammar of the inverted sentence in question, “they” is clearly a
subject complement, which by definition is a word or phrase that follows a linking verb and describes or renames the subject of a sentence, A subject complement such as “the winners of the contests” serves to provide more information about that subject, and the rule in English grammar for pronouns as subject complement is for them to take its subjective form rather than its objective form.
It needs emphasizing here that a telltale sign of a subject complement at work is that the information it provides is always preceded by a form of the linking verb “be,” which is the case in “The winners of the contests
were they.” Thus, although it may sometimes seem or sound better to use the objective “them” in such sentences, as in “The winners of the contests
were them,” this usage is actually grammatically flawed.
Let’s now examine this notion cited in the follow-up question: “(In such inverted sentences) we usually think of the subject as being in post-verb position. But according to inverse copular construction, the normal subject has inverted to a post-verb position, and the predicative nominal has inverted to the pre-verb position.” (To understand this rather forbidding statement, just keep in mind that “copula” is simply a variant of the term “linking verb,” and “inverse copular construction” simply a variant of “inverted sentence construction.”)
What happens when a sentence is inverted was correctly described by the grammar enthusiast as follows: “the normal subject goes to a post-verb position and the predicative nominal goes to the pre-verb position.” Such inverted reconstructions admittedly make it difficult for nonspecialists to distinguish between the subject and predicate of the sentence, but what’s important is that the fundamental rules of English grammar aren’t violated.
In the test sentence at issue here, “The winners of the contests were (they, them),” it’s clear that “
They were the winners of the contests” is the normative sentence and “The winners of the contests were
they” is the inverted sentence. However, whether a sentence is normative or inverted, pronouns working as subject complement should always take the subjective form rather than the objective form.
Thus, given the English grammar rule cited at the outset, the normative sentence “
They were the winners of the contests” is clearly called for because “they” as subject is in fact already in the subjective form. On the other hand, in the inverted sentence, “The winners of the contests were
they” is clearly the correct usage because this time, “they” is the subject complement and so must likewise take that subjective form.
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MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL OF MY READERS!(Next:
More subject-verb agreement oddities of inverted sentences) December 26, 2019
This essay, 1,175th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the December 12, 2019 print and Internet editions of The Manila Times
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