Confusion regarding "I" and "me" [duplicate]

Solution 1:

You find both accusative pronouns (me/him/her/them) and nominative pronouns (I/he/she/they) in this syntactic position in standard English. The forms with the nominal genitive pronouns (mine/yours/hers etc.) are a red herring because they stand for something possessed rather than the person themself.

The traditional rule for comparison with a person is that you must use nominative. However, according to my research, accusative is more common.

I searched the Corpus of Contemporary American English for this syntactic structure, followed by a comma or a period to ensure we are not looking for cases like faster than he is, with a verb following the pronoun, in which case nominative is obligatory.

There were 1046 results for the accusative pronouns and 450 for nominative pronouns, more than 2 to 1 in favor of accusative pronouns—the “traditionally wrong” form. Both forms are standard, so my advice to a writer choosing between these forms is to consider that the “traditionally correct” form is unimpeachably correct but a bit formal. Choose the form that best matches tone and formality level of your writing.

For the curious, the queries looked like this:

[jjr*] than me|him|her|us|them .|,
[jjr*] than I|he|she|we|they .|,

where[jjr*] means any comparative adjective.

Update 2011-05-23

Using the new Google Book Corpus search, I was able to construct a Google ngrams-like graph comparing these usages over time, using these two queries: accusative, nominative:

As you can see, until the late 1980s, the formal usage was more common than the informal usage. Since then, however, accusative has very rapidly eclipsed nominative, even in this corpus, which represents professionally published works.

Solution 2:

Ah, you've stumbled onto a controversy even the experts haven't completely settled. It all depends on whether you think than is a conjunction or a preposition.

First, remember that "I" is always a subject, and "me" is always an object.

If than is a conjunction, then it's joining two complete sentences, and the "am" that you mention is the implied predicate of that sentence. In that case, "I" is the correct subject. (Except where's the comma you normally would use before an and that joins two sentences?)

If than is a preposition, then there is a prepositional phrase, which needs an object, not a subject. In that case, "me" is the correct pronoun.

Consensus seems to be on the side of the "conjunctionists" -- even if common usage isn't. I always use than like a conjunction in writing, but in speaking, I usually find myself using it as a preposition because it feels more natural somehow. So I guess I have a foot in both camps. ;)

There's an excellent discussion of this at Grammar Girl's blog.

Solution 3:

The prescriptivist answer is that ‘He is taller than I’ is correct. The justification often given is that the sentence is an ellipsis of ‘He is taller than I am’, but this appears to be an ex post facto justification of a somewhat arbitrary preference: modern linguistic analysis shows this kind of verbal ellipsis is impossible in other similar contexts and is therefore unlikely to be occurring here. To quote Alan Munn, a linguist who does research in syntax, ‘There's no syntactic evidence that the position after “than” here is a subject, so the accusative is the only linguistically sane form’. If I remember correctly, data on real spoken English show that me is considerably more common than I in this kind of construction.

In formal writing and speaking it is probably safest to use the prescriptively correct ‘than I’; in any other context ‘than me’ is not just acceptable, but normal usage for a majority of speakers. Indeed, in many contexts the use of ‘than I’ will strike a great many people as unduly formal, the sign of someone who ‘talks like a book’.

Solution 4:

"I can run faster than he." is technically correct, because it is short for "I can run faster than he can run." In fact, you are comparing your speed to his speed, not to him personally. This shortening of the sentence is called an elliptical construction, because the remainder of the "he" clause is understood. The tendency is to treat "than" as a preposition. (See also Safire on this point.)

Solution 5:

Both are possible English sentences. In the first, than is a preposition, and pronouns that follow prepositions are normally in the objective case. In the second, than is a conjunction and joins the clause He is wiser to the clause I (am).

The first construction is less formal than the second, and is probably used by native speakers more often. The second might be used by speakers afraid that if they used me they would be making a mistake, but, in almost all contexts, they would not be.