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Consider the prototypical sentence:

Let us get back to me watching TV.

What's the correct breakdown of each piece of this sentence? I was trying to use this as an example of why the correct pluralization of the object should be, e.g.,

Let us get back to John and me watching TV.

vs.

Let us get back to John and I watching TV.

I realized that I was not actually sure of the correct way to parse the sentence and I was relying on the logic that "me" should become "John and me" rather than "John and I" but I could not come up with the correct grammatical argument. It seems that the prepositional phrase "back to" takes an object and so the objective form "me" is invoked. What's the explanation for the prepositional phrase requiring an object in this case, though?

Edit: Some comments take issue with my example sentence. Consider instead, then:

Let us returen to discussing me watching TV.

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    It makes no sense to say "Let us get back to me watching TV"; same applies to your other examples.
    – BillJ
    Commented Jul 31, 2017 at 19:06
  • Yes. The example is ill-chosen. If the question is whether to use I or me as the subject of a gerund, the answer is me. Gerunds do not appear with nominative pronoun subjects, though they do appear with objective and possessive subjects (just not both in the same clause).
    – John Lawler
    Commented Jul 31, 2017 at 19:11
  • For what it's worth, doesn't back belong to get back more than to back to? The fact that we are looking at three choices does not make them more appealing than a redo, like "Get back to the part where John and I were watching TV."
    – Yosef Baskin
    Commented Jul 31, 2017 at 19:12
  • @BillJ how about "Let us return to discussing me watching TV?"
    – skratch
    Commented Jul 31, 2017 at 20:01
  • @JohnLawler I think your comment answers the heart of my question, although perhaps I chose a poorly formed sentence.
    – skratch
    Commented Jul 31, 2017 at 20:02

1 Answer 1

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'Let us' already includes you, who suggests an action ('let us')in the now, so when you say 'let us get back to me watching TV' - it's as you're watching TV but at the very same instance you want to get back to it, which is logically impossible. That's why it doesn't work. Hope it helps.

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