What makes be intransitive? How to tell one meaning from the other? [closed]

intransitive-verbs

Let's be clear about one thing. Latin and Greek are strongly inflected languages. Their nouns and adjectives have different forms not just for plural and singular, but for the roles of subject (nominative), addressee (vocative), possession/origin (genitive); interest (dative); and agent/cause/source/origin (ablative -) Latin only (represented by genitive in Greek. Most of these have disappeared from most modern European languages (except Latin, preserved in the aspic of the Vatican). In English, some pronouns inflect slightly, and the usage has loosened in my lifetime. Even now it has not stabilised.

The reason why you find inconsistency is that language, as ever, is evolving through the reproductive process of usage. Just like cell division, so with words, mistakes get made. Some of these do not matter and so can carry on, others die out. That process is accelerating. This is because the English language is no longer a function of the forces of the church, school, university and editing. Now just about anyone can 'publish', and in the process conversational language enters the written language.

So now my answer "It is I" your "who's there" sounds foolish or snobbish. The so called nominatives, 'I/he/she' look weird anywhere but immediately in front of a verb. Why? Because nobody uses it anywhere else. 'Whom' seems to be moribund except after a preposition. Even there, the growing preference for delayed prepositions may well be an instinctive 'whom'-avoidance mechanism.

All this is happening while governments (especially the British one) are pressing teachers to put the language back into some kind of regulated grammar box.

It makes like particularly hard for learners of English as a foreign language, because of the ubiquity of exceptions and special cases . But to our shame they manage far better with our rebellious tongue than we do with theirs.

The STATEMENT MADE BY NATIVES:

Be is not transitive.

This part is correct. Be is certainly not a transitive verb; be is an auxiliary verb.

that’s why “Whom can he be?” and “Who can be him?” are wrong.

This may be a statement made by some natives, but it's wrong. And not all natives say it. So forget that part. And ignore those failed examples. They're wrong to start with, and don't exemplify anything.

So, the reason why I don’t want to be him is correct is not because be is transitive, but rather because him is the basic form of the 3rd person singular masculine pronoun. This may be surprising; many people have been told that he is the pronoun and him is for objects only. This is no longer true, if it ever was.

He is a special form used only for subjects of tensed clauses; any other (non-possessive) use gets him (similar remarks for the pronoun pairs me/I, her/she, us/we, and them/they). These used to be case-form variants, like German pronouns, but unlike German, English doesn't have cases for nouns at all, and they've pretty much disappeared in English pronouns, too.

That's why Him and me are gonna go together is a normal thing to say. Neither I nor he is really comfortable in a conjoined NP, so me and him pop up naturally. Similarly, when a pronoun is a predicate nominal, you get him, as in I wouldn't want to be him.

Of the examples given, neither (1) nor (2) are correct; (2) is ungrammatical, and (1) doesn't make sense unless the predicate be him is taken metaphorically, to refer (for instance) to an actor playing some historic figure: