"Bob and us" or "Bob and we" or "Bob and ourselves"?
In the singular, it is quite clear that one uses "I" when referring to a third party and oneself, as in:
Bob and I are going to build an aircraft.
However, in the plural, it is a lot less clear. For example, if a group of boy scouts are talking about their next project and want to include an outsider, e.g. Sarah:
Sarah and we are going to build an aircraft.
Or would it be:
Sarah and us are going to build an aircraft.
Or even:
Sarah and ourselves are going to build an aircraft.
Please help as otherwise I'll have to shelve the whole aircraft project.
Solution 1:
I don't think anyone would word the sentence in the examples provided. It would be either "Sarah is going to build an aircraft with us." or "We are going to build an aircraft with Sarah."
To answer your question directly, I would assume that "Sarah and we are going to build an aircraft" is correct (if you insist on using that word structure), because if Sarah wasn't there it would be "We are going to build an aircraft"
Solution 2:
Try:
We and Sarah are going to build an aircraft.
Other than that, as others have suggested, avoiding the question (by putting "...with Sarah" at the end of the sentence) is probably the way to go.
Solution 3:
This is an example where prescriptive grammar fails us (in practice I mean). Generations of people have had drummed into them that they must say “John and I went” not “Me and John went”, because of some supposed rule imported from Latin. (See¹ Emonds, J. “Grammatically deviant prestige dialect constructions.”A Festschift for Sol Saporta. Ed. M. Brame, H. Contreras and F. Newmeyer. Seattle: Noit Amrofer, 1985, for why “John and I went” cannot be part of any naturally learnt variety of English).
But “Sarah and we/us” is not frequent enough that phrases like it often come up in pedagogy, so we are left with two unpalatable alternatives: “Sarah and us” must be wrong because “Sarah and me” is wrong; but “Sarah and we” doesn’t sound right either, and we don’t know what to say.
Emonds discusses a number of more complicated cases where people are often unsure about the application of the rule, but I don't remember whether they include this one.
[¹ Edited to correct title of paper and provide proper citation, 3 December 2010. Text available at fine.me.uk, February 2011.]
Solution 4:
If Sarah is part of the aircraft-building team, she would normally be included in we. If you mean something different, perhaps We (Sarah, the family and I) are going to...?
Solution 5:
As the other answers have mentioned:
"Sarah and us are going to build..." or "Us and Sarah are going to build..." is proscribed by the authors of mainstream grammar guides. Linguists generally disagree with the idea that an objective-case pronoun in ungrammatical in this context (for an explanation of some of the relevant literature, see my answer to When do I use “I” instead of “me?”); in fact, using a subjective pronoun in these contexts seems to be what's unnatural according to the internalized grammar of native speakers (which is why they need to memorize rules to be able to use subject pronouns "correctly"). But that isn't likely to change the mind of anyone who views it as "incorrect", and in this particular case, the objective pronoun sounds awkward to most people anyway.
"Sarah and we are going to build..." (or "We and Sarah are going to build...") is what you get if you mechanically apply the "remove other words and check which pronoun you'd use" rule. However, a linguist would say that rule doesn't necessarily produce grammatical sentences, since as mentioned before, the use of subject pronouns in coordinate noun phrases like this is arguably not "grammatical" at the deepest level in English. And any prescriptivist who doesn't have a tin ear would agree that this phrasing is, at minimum, infelicitous.
The natural construction here in my opinion is to use "with" instead of "and", as thesaundi's answer says and as Eldroß suggested in a comment:
- "We are going to build an aircraft with Sarah."
- "Sarah is going to build an aircraft with us."
Nobody would interpret the first as meaning Sarah is the material with which you're building the aircraft. It's a completely harmless ambiguity (of a type that is ubiquitous in English), and it is completely disambiguated by prior knowledge ("Sarah" is a person's name, and we don't build aircraft out of people) so it's silly to avoid this structure just because it is technically ambiguous. You might as well avoid "are going" because it's ambiguous between referring to plans for the future and referring to literal motion.
Or you could say something like
- "Sarah and the rest of us are going to build an aircraft."