Shift in analysis

The elliptical phrase is something I learned in high school.  She is taller than I is an example.  My sophomore and senior English teachers helped me to understand the concept.  She is taller than I is the sentence and (am tall) is the portion of the sentence that is left out, or ellipsed.  Thus, She is taller than I (am tall) is the way to understand the sentence.  Some people actually say, She is taller than I am, and only leave out the word tall.  So, the elliptical conclusion made sense to me.

This knowledge lasted about 20 years, but then I noticed that people under the age of 40 prefer a different sentence, She is taller than me.  That begs a different analysis.  These people heard the taller than I part and didn't think it matched the construction of the language they spoke.  They thought the word than acted more like a preposition, which is followed by an object, rather than a comparative adjective followed by a connector to an elliptical (invisible) phrase.  So, very logically, they placed the object form of the first person singular pronoun after the preposition than.  That makes good sense to me.

The shift in analysis shows a couple of truths about language.  First, speakers of a language can change the language at any time they choose.  (A couple of other examples of this truth is found with the words hart and ye.  Hart fell into disfavor and disappeared from the language altogether, and the second person singular pronoun ye was not liked after the 1700s, so it dropped and people substituted its popular twin you.) Second, what makes sense to one generation of speakers doesn't make sense at all to a following generation, so they change the analysis to use a form that does make sense.  (An additional example comes from the fact that so many speakers have decidedly not accepted the split infinitive rule as a sensible analysis.  People will say to not like (something) in preference to not to like (something) over and over again.  They don't agree that to should not be separated with another word from its verb .)

I find that in areas of life that don't make sense, I will inevitably "fix" the problem.  I will analyze a situation and drop or change the part that doesn't fit for something more sensible.  That explains a few shifts in thinking I have experienced lately.  Not only am I comfortable in making the changes, I enjoy life more since those changes fit a more suitable paradigm.