Grammar nerds unite. So I'm helping edit a paper for my younger cousin and I came across a peculiar sentence. He wrote: "This served as a large obstacle for my family and me to overcome." At first glance I thought it was written correctly. I did the make it me/I test to come up with - "This served as a large obstacle for me..." and it seemed normal. But then the "overcome" part threw me off. An object pronoun follows after a verb, right? Served is the verb in this sentence. But there's a second verb being used here in "overcome." Does that matter? Is it still me? I kind of want to tell him to just rewrite it as "This served as a large obstacle to overcome for my family and me." I think that might clean it up a bit.
I personally don't like it when people use "This" as a noun rather than as an adjective to a noun. Change it to "This issue" or whatever the issue is. And yes, you are right about "me" and the use of object pronouns. Good luck!
"This served as a large obstacle to overcome for my family and me." I would rewrite this to "This served as a large obstacle to overcome for my family and I."
In the paper it's actually written out. I just didn't want to write the actual thing so I simplified. But hmm... There has been two varying opinions already lol
When in doubt, just take out the other noun (i.e. family) and see if it fits. "This served as a large obstacle for me to overcome." vs "This served as a large obstacle for I to overcome." With that said I would have said "...me and the fams" because it's cuter.
First of all, the correct way to write this is "my family and me." The reason is fairly simple, but nobody here has actually identified why. You are getting hung up on "for" and "to overcome" for good reason. They are part of what might be called a noun phrase, which is actually the object of the preposition "as." So in this case, "This [noun] served [verb] as [preposition] a large obstacle for my family and me to overcome [object of the proposition]. Also, you've identified the fact that an object of a proposition can be a phrase that includes both nouns and verbs as well. In this case, "as," not "for, or to overcome" takes precedence.
That's incorrect. "I" is the object of the preposition "for" and therefore needs to be an object form "me" rather than a subject form "I".
Your latter correction seems right. WHO is doing the action? To WHOM is the action being done? "WHO" is a subject. "WHOM" is the object. WHO/WHAT is "This", it "served." That's the first part of your sentence. The second part has "to" which makes your family and you an object. If you switched it around and made the sentence more 'passive action', the sentence "For my family and [for] me, this served as a large obstacle to overcome" would also be well written and grammatically correct.
I think "I" only works as whole or part of a subject, then "me" as a direct or indirect object. And "myself" is presumably overused for a mistaken sense of formality.
For somebody that is supposed to be the grammar nazi on this board, you sure are coming up with some janky terms to describe this sentence construction. Adding a dependent clause to the beginning of his sentence doesn't make it any more or less passive. The second part of the sentence is "to"? By the way, the previous sentence is what is considered passive since the subject of the sentence "to" is acting as the object. In your example, the subject of your sentence is still "this". In which case, "this" is the pronoun antecedent, so we'd need the previous sentence to understand what "this" stands for. Also, "to" is in no way the second part of this sentence. By the way, I still don't understand what "part" means. I think you meant to say that "to" is acting as a prepositional phrase, but that is also incorrect. "To overcome" is the infinitive conjugation of overcome.
