Forum: ell.stackexchange.com
Tags: <pronouns>
Title: Using she or you to refer to someone "as a little girl"
Question: I read this somewhere and it said:   I still remember you as a little girl who overwaters plants because  she  doesn't know when to stop giving.   But in this sentence, the person says 'you' and 'little girl', but then uses 'she' as a third person.   Shouldn't it be:   I still remember you as a little girl who overwaters plants because  you  didn't know when to stop giving.

Answers:
sents: text: Both are nearly the same to me.
text: The nuances are about perspective:
text: The sentence that uses "she" is talking about the "the little girl" from the memory, almost as if she was a different person than the woman in the present.
text: You can use that phrasing to distance the two people.
text: This is especially common when the speaker's view of the person has changed: Before we started hanging out, I only knew you as the guy who came late to class everyday because he kept oversleeping.
text: The sentence that uses "you" links the person in the memory with the actual person.
text: There is no distancing.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/26135/Senjougahara Hitagi
score: 23
sents: text: Both are correct.
text: In the first sentence, the speaker remembers the girl with particular label.
text: The label being "a little-girl-who-over waters-plants-because-she-doesn't-know-when-to-stop-giving.".
text: In the second sentence, the speaker is directly telling her that he remembers her as a little girl who over waters her plants.
text: You can use both as neither is incorrect.
text: It is just the matter of the way you address the subject.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/27122/Varun Nair
score: 4
sents: text: The key part of the sentence that you've not picked up on is the 'as'.
text: The writer is making a comparison between 'you' and 'a little girl who overwaters plants because she doesn't know when to stop giving'.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/27367/AdamJS
score: 3
sents: text: We can assume that the addressed audience of this sentence is an adult woman.
text: From one perspective, the adult woman and the little girl are the same person.
text: From another, they are not.
text: The little girl no longer exists and is not the same as the adult she later became.
text: I have no reason to suspect, for instance, that this woman over-waters her plants.
text: The model sentence assumes this second perspective.
text: The woman is represented by a second-person pronoun: "you".
text: The phrase "a little girl" is a third-person noun phrase.
text: The antecedent of "she" is "a little girl", making the third-person pronoun form appropriate.
text: The little girl isn't even real.
text: She's a product of the speaker's imagination or memory, nothing more than some hypothetical figment.
text: She might never have existed at all, outside of the speaker's perceptions.
text: We can treat her as an eternal concept.
text: As an eternal concept, that it agrees with a verb the present tense makes sense.
text: In the speaker's memory, the little girl still doesn't know when to stop.
text: Your proposed revision takes the other perspective.
text: The woman and the little girl are the same person, but at different stages of her life.
text: The "you" of "you didn't know when to stop giving" has the same antecedent as the "you" earlier in the sentence.
text: Both refer to the addressed adult woman.
text: Your revision uses the past tense.
text: This is sensible because that stage of development is in the adult woman's past.
text: The "you" and the "she" exist in different timeframes.
text: These different timeframes lead to different implications.
text: Your revision implies that the woman now knows when to stop.
text: She didn't know as a child, but the past tense lets us safely assume that she has stopped not knowing.
text: The difference between the woman and the child is established.
text: A different revision uses the present tense throughout:
text: I still remember you as a little girl who over-waters plants because you don't know when to stop giving.
text: This implies that nothing has changed.
text: The woman didn't know when to stop as a child, and she doesn't know when to stop as an adult.
text: The similarity between the woman and the child is established.
text: In the original, the third-person "she" is conceptually distinct from the second person "you".
text: The little girl eternally lacks that knowledge.
text: From that sentence, we have no idea at all whether the adult woman knows.
text: The original sentence gives me no reason to assume that the adult woman over-waters her plants, but it also gives me no reason to assume that the present-day woman doesn't over-water her plants.
text: The difference or similarity between woman and child is left unspecified.
text: That lack of specificity is not possible with the pronoun "you", but it is possible with the pronoun
text: "she".
text: That's the difference that a shift in perspective can produce.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/12283/Gary Botnovcan
score: 2
sents: text: The first sentence means: I still remember you as X. where the adjective-phrase X stands for "a little girl who over-waters plants because she doesn't know when to stop giving".
text: The second sentence means: I still remember you as Y because you didn't know when to stop giving.
text: where the adjective-phrase Y stands for "a little girl who over-waters plants".
text: There is a difference in the adjective-phrases.
text: As another example, consider: You have the same color as the tail of the horse that is white.
text: The second form of the sentence would not make much sense here.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/27379/user1952500
score: 1

Summary of the answers:
Both are correct. In the first sentence, the speaker remembers the person. In the second sentence, the speaker is   directly  telling her that he remembers her as a little girl who over waters her plants. The sentence that uses "she" is talking about the "the little girl" from a memory, almost as if she was a different person than the woman in the present.
Both make sense, it is a matter of perspective.