[4] An example in which the subject complement is a clause is: In some languages, adjectives are stative verbs and do not require a copula in predicative use.
Eighteenth-century grammarians such as Joseph Priestley justified the colloquial usage of subject complements in instances such as it is me (and it is him, he is taller than him, etc.)
[5] Other grammarians, including Baker (1770), Campbell (1776), and Lindley Murray (1795), say the first person pronoun must be I rather than me because it is a nominative that is equivalent to the subject.
[6][verification needed] However, modern grammarians such as Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum deny that such a rule exists in English and claim that such opinions "confuse correctness with formality".
Similarly, the clitic accusative form can serve as a subject complement as well as a direct object (il l'est 'he is [that/it]', cf.