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My grammar lecturer told us that "I thought her selfish." is correct and it is used like the sentence "I thought she was selfish." He said native English speakers use this structure a lot, but us non-native speakers don't. Which confused me.

I asked my friends who were native English speakers and one of them said that it's old English. I tried researching about it but to no avail. Can someone please justify why "I thought her selfish." is correct grammatically, even if it's an outdated grammar rule? I really want to know.

Andrew Leach
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Nana
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  • Wow, they told the whole class? Not just some fraction of the class? :P While grammatically correct, "I thought her selfish." has a somewhat nineteenth-century ring to it, at least from this native speaker's perspective. "I thought she was selfish." is the more modern, and less distractingly dated, way of phrasing the same idea. – Rivers McForge Jan 05 '21 at 08:09
  • Why do you think "her" functions as a possessive determiner, not an object pronoun, here? According to you, is it "I thought him selfish" or "I thought his selfish"? – niamulbengali Jan 05 '21 at 08:13
  • It is not the possessive, but the object form, as in "I saw her" - "I considered her to be selfish".. It is not 'Old English' in the sense of Anglo-Saxon, but it is indeed a rather dated usage. – Kate Bunting Jan 05 '21 at 08:41

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