Talk:us two

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Connel MacKenzie tagged this back in February, but doesn't seem to have brought it here. (?) —Ruakh_TALK 20:58, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

By the way, this strikes me as a conflation of two things:

• simple apposition of the pronoun us with the determiner-pronoun two
• a mis-cutting from simple apposition of the pronoun us with a noun phrase that starts with the determiner-adjective two

neither of which seems to warrant inclusion. (There's the interesting fact that us often-but-non-standardly replaces we when it's followed by an appositive, but that's not special to us two; you see the same thing regardless of the form of the appositive, as exemplified in two of the first 10 b.g.c. hits for "us boys have".)

—Ruakh_TALK 23:06, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

I've added to the page some illiterate quotations by Shakespeare, Cooper, Hardy, Dickens, and Kipling. The Dickens quote in particular does not fit your hypothesis. --EncycloPetey 23:18, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

O.K., first of all, to clarify: I didn't add the {{illiterate}} tag, and don't agree with its inclusion.

Second of all, how doesn't the Dickens quote fit my hypothesis? It's synonymous with "Us being alone now, sir", but with "two" being added in apposition to "us". (Or am I missing something?) Compare the analogously constructed "Us men being alone now."

All the quotations you gave fall into the same pattern, with "two" being in apposition to "us". (There could also be quotations with a slightly different pattern, with "two __" being apposition to "us", but none of yours are like that.)

—Ruakh_TALK 00:17, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

I also wonder how this isn't simply a sum of parts, along with you two and we two. Dmcdevit·t 03:02, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Because it's not a generally predictable pattern of apposition. The construction is limited to plural personal pronouns. I can find exactly five forms: us two, we two, you two, them two, and they two, but this doesn't extend to other pronouns or to other forms of these pronouns. I'd like to note two additional points: (1) For constructions like "we boys" or "you boys", it is a plural noun that is in apposition, but in "we two" and "you two", it is a number/determiner "in apposition", which is not what one would expect from the usual pattern. (2) One may say "we boys" or "you boys" and have the construction considered acceptable, but one cannot say "them boys" (without sounding illiterate) and can never say "they boys".

In other words, this is not a predictable pattern, nor may the apposition idea be uniformly applied. My personal suspicion is that theseconstructions exist in English as carry-over from a time when literate students were trained in the Classics, where one encounters singular, dual, and plural forms. --EncycloPetey 16:55, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, I think I see what you're saying. Even if <substantive> <determiner-pronoun in apposition> is restricted to those cases where <substantive> is a plural personal pronoun (which isn't 100% the case — there are plenty of examples of "brother mine", "the sisters three", etc., though I'm willing to set them aside as archaisms — and also of "the people all danced" and whatnot, which the OED doesn't consider an adverb use, though I guess that doesn't stop us from considering it so), you seem to be saying that the only special component is the pronoun. Since I think it's clear that we shouldn't have entries for each of we three, we four, we all, we few, and every other such for which we can find three durably archived attestations, would you agree that the reasonable thing to do is to have usage notes at we, us, you, etc. explaining this use, and not to have individual articles for we two, etc.?

(By the way, I think it makes sense that people would only use <substantive> <determiner-pronoun in apposition> when <determiner-adjective> <substantive> is unavailable — specifically, when the substantive is we/us/you — since the latter is a simpler and more natural construction. *They two is impossible because we say those two; them two sounds illiterate because there exist non-standard dialects where them is used productively as a determiner, so we use the illiterate determiner parse instead of the impossible pronoun parse.)

—Ruakh_TALK 18:01, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

The CGEL concludes that constructions like us all and them both are compound pronouns (universal personal pronouns) and also says that the construction extends to other related forms, but I can't say that their reasoning (or explanation) is very clear. --EncycloPetey 23:51, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Are they using a line of argument like #3 at http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003383.html? Because I would agree that "gave them both up" is grammatical while *"gave up them both" is not (and Google agrees; though Google is actually O.K. with "gave up them", so maybe it doesn't believe in argument #3). —Ruakh_TALK 13:07, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Yes, the reasoning runs along similar lines, though not with these precise arguments. (And in the particular argument you've linked, I'd say point number 2 is flawed since it only applies to the use of "all + these"; no other quantifiers work with "this/these"). --EncycloPetey 03:40, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

RFV passed. DAVilla 02:47, 1 May 2007 (UTC)