You'd rather us be dead

[rightnow]

You'd rather us be dead

How should this sentence be analyzed and parsed?
Is it different from "You'd rather we were ded"?

 

[Loob]

It looks wrong to me, rightnow.
Where did you find it?

 

[lingobingo]

It’s difficult to parse, since it seems to be another example of an object pronoun being used colloquially in a construction that logically requires a subject pronoun (or a different verb form – see below).

You’d rather us be dead
You’d rather [that] we be dead​

You’d rather [that] we were dead​

​

You’d prefer us to be dead ​

You’d prefer [that] we be dead​

You’d prefer [that] we were dead​

You’d prefer it if we were dead​

​

Loob – there’s a link in the OP, though you may need to refresh the page for the text to come up.

 

[rightnow]

It looks wrong to me, rightnow.
Where did you find it?

If you click the sentence it takes you to its Google books excerpt, but the sentence can be easily found googling "rather us be dead"

 

[rightnow]

It’s difficult to parse, since it seems to be another example of an object pronoun being used colloquially in a construction that logically requires a subject pronoun (or a different verb form – see below).

You’d rather us be dead​

You’d rather [that] we be dead​

You’d rather [that] we were dead​

​

What about "You'd rather our being dead"?

 

[lingobingo]

Not idiomatic.

 

[ewie]

You'd rather us be dead still looks like a plain, honest mistake to me, even in colloquial speech.

 

[lingobingo]

It’s certainly difficult to justify grammatically! But it sounds so feasible as informal dialogue in a sci-fi novel (which is what it is: Three) that I’d hesitate to use the dreaded word “wrong”.