Jose A. Carillo
Jose A. Carillo

In my column last week, I discussed why the pronoun “they” rather than “them” is the correct form of the subject complement in this inverted sentence: “The winners of the contests were (they, them).” In reply to an interesting follow-up question on my Facebook page by grammar enthusiast Marianne Freya Gutib, I explained that the operative grammar rule in such situations is that in English, a pronoun acting as a subject complement always takes the subjective form whether the sentence is in its normative or inverted form.

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