On what basis are “all of us” and “all of we” a good word?
When using “all of us” as a subject in a sentence, the pronoun stays an object pronoun as such. All of
us are in the same boat.
The alternate construction just sounds weird (to my ears, at least), even though it “follows” the subject-verb agreement:
All of us are in the same boat.
And in order to make sense, would have to be rephrased like this:
We are all in the same boat.
Why is there so much noise in the streets? I know “All of us” is the correct version of the two above, but everything people say about subject-verb agreement would seem to imply otherwise.
Why the object pronoun stays the object pronoun on NN because it is the object in the majority of instances.
I can’t say “all of we” for the exact same reason you can’t say “expect of we”, or “the book of he”, or “get this off of I”, “of” doesn’t get used with the nominative case, in fact it is a case marker for not nominative and indeed one of just a couple case markers English still has left.
However, before the subject of the sentence, it’s the entire phrase all of us, the head word being “all”. A perfect accusative pronoun is the unmarked form and thus does not preclude a subject from being the object. Yet we accept that something is wrong with an objective pronoun
or subject.
Why the object pronoun stays the object pronoun on NN because it is the object in the majority of instances.
I can’t say “all of we” for the exact same reason you can’t say “expect of we”, or “the book of he”, or “get this off of I”, “of” doesn’t get used with the nominative case, in fact it is a case marker for not nominative and indeed one of just a couple case markers English still has left.
However, before the subject of the sentence, it’s the entire phrase all of us, the head word being “all”. A perfect accusative pronoun is the unmarked form and thus does not preclude a subject from being the object. Yet we accept that something is wrong with an objective pronoun
or subject.
Why the object pronoun stays the object pronoun on NN because it is the object in the majority of instances.
I can’t say “all of we” for the exact same reason you can’t say “expect of we”, or “the book of he”, or “get this off of I”, “of” doesn’t get used with the nominative case, in fact it is a case marker for not nominative and indeed one of just a couple case markers English still has left.
However, before the subject of the sentence, it’s the entire phrase all of us, the head word being “all”. A perfect accusative pronoun is the unmarked form and thus does not preclude a subject from being the object. Yet we accept that something is wrong with an objective pronoun
or subject.
