Case
In linguistics, a "case" refers to the grammatical category that indicates the relationship between a noun or pronoun and other words in a sentence. It typically reflects the noun's role as a subject, object, or possessor. Different languages have varying case systems, with some using inflections on nouns and pronouns to denote case, while others rely on word order or prepositions.
6 Key excerpts on "Case"
eBook - ePub- Peter S. Baker(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...Chapter 4 Case 4.1 What is Case? Case is the inflection of nouns, pronouns and adjectives to signal their functions in sentences and clauses. Those who have studied Latin or German know the concept of Case well, for it is important in those languages. In Modern English, however, Case has nearly disappeared. Adjectives have no Case endings at all. Nouns are generally inflected for Case only when singular, and then only by adding ’ s to form the possessive. 1 In these sentences, the difference in form between the two italicized words is one of Case: The king is in the hall. The king’s bodyguard is in the tavern. We make more Case distinctions with pronouns than we do with nouns. We use one form for subjects: We will learn this language. She sold lemon platt. We use another form for direct objects, indirect objects and objects of prepositions: They beat us at bridge. Don’t lie to me. Reader, I married him. And we use still another form for possessives: Our swords are better than your swords. My mother warned me about their wiles. Modern English distinctions such as king/king’s, I/me/my, he/him/his and we/us/our have descended to us directly from Old English, though over the centuries the number of distinct Case forms, and even the number of Cases, has declined. Modern English pronouns have at most three Cases, which grammarians call subjective, objective and possessive. Old English, on the other hand, has five: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and instrumental. The Modern English subjective Case is descended from the Old English nominative, and the Modern English possessive is from the Old English genitive. The Modern English objective has taken over the functions of the Old English accusative, dative and instrumental; it has distinct forms only in pronouns, and these forms are from the Old English dative. 4.2 Uses of the Cases Case, as mentioned above, tells us something about the function of a noun, adjective or pronoun in a sentence or clause...
eBook - ePubModern Russian Grammar
A Practical Guide
- John Dunn, Shamil Khairov(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...3 Case 3.0 Introduction The use of the Case system to indicate different grammatical functions can be illustrated by the three different forms of the English pronoun ‘he’. The form ‘he’ is used to indicate the subject of a sentence: He can see me. The form ‘him’ is used among other functions to indicate either the direct or the indirect object of a verb. It is also used after prepositions: I can see The classifi cation of verbshim. I gave him the book. I haven’t heard from him for a long time. The form ‘his’ is used to indicate possession: I have borrowed his book. The Russian Case system is much more complicated. As noted in Chapter 2, there are six Cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental and prepositional. In addition, the Case system encompasses not only nouns, but also adjectives, pronouns and numerals. The declension of adjectives, pronouns and numerals is described in Chapters 6, 7 and 8 respectively. A further complication is that almost all of the Cases are used in a wide variety of functions and the relationship between these different functions is in many instances neither obvious nor logical. The aim of this chapter is to examine the principal functions of each of the Cases in turn. There are two points to note here. The first is that this chapter concentrates on the principal functions of the Cases; further illustrations of the different ways in which they are used will be given in Part B of this book. The second is that each of the Cases can be used after prepositions: a list of prepositions and the Cases they are used with is given in 9.2. 3.1 The nominative Dictionaries and vocabularies The nominative is the form under which nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals are listed in dictionaries, vocabularies and other word lists...
eBook - ePubA Comparative Typology of English and German
Unifying the Contrasts
- John Hawkins(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...non-subject). English thus gives consistent expression to the subject/non-subject distinction in all its pronouns except for you and it. German is less consistent in this respect since it allocates its two forms to the three Cases in different ways: the accusative joins either the nominative or the dative. Nonetheless, its pronominal morphology is more expressive than that of English in two ways. First, the number of pronouns with distinct Case forms is always greater than or equal to that of English. Second, the number of (non-possessive) Case distinctions drawn throughout the total pronominal system of English (i.e. two, subject (or nominative) versus non-subject (or non-nominative)) is properly included in the corresponding German set (three), since non-subject in English is matched by both accusative and dative in German. And both languages have comparably distinct possessive pronouns. Considering both non-pronominal NPs and pronouns together, therefore, all the Case distinctions that are drawn in English inflectional morphology are drawn in German as well, though the converse fails. In this sense, the Case morphology of German properly includes that of English. 2.3 The Uses of the Cases All the major handbooks of German devote many pages to a discussion of the various uses of the four Cases. The assignment of Case to a noun phrase seems to be largely determined by the choice of accompanying verb, adjective or preposition. More precisely, let us follow Emonds (1976 :13) in defining a ‘phrasal category’ as a category that can dominate NP by virtue of applying base rules. I.e. sentence (S), verb phrase (VP), adjective phrase (AP), prepositional phrase (PP) and noun phrase (NP) are all phrasal categories. We will further define the verb (V), adjective (A), preposition (P) and noun (N) as ‘heads of phrase’ within their respective phrasal categories (cf. Jackendoff 1977, Gazdar and Pullum 1981 and Hawkins 1984 for further discussion of the notion ‘head’)...
eBook - ePub- Iwona Sadowska(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 2 Case Usage 2.1 Case Names and Order Polish is a highly inflected language, with words taking many different endings (suffixes) to show their many meanings. Case endings are added to words to indicate their function in a sentence. These Case endings vary for different classes (also referred to as genders, see 3.2.1) and numbers. In other words, Polish is a Case language. What is a Case ? Case is a grammatical concept that through a set of different endings attached to the nominal forms (noun, adjective, pronoun, numeral, and/or participle) explains who does what to whom without heavily relying on word order. Ludzi e <who NOM> ludzio m <to whom DAT> zgotowali <VERB> ten los <what ACC> ‘ People <who NOM> created < VERB > this fate <what ACC> for [other] people <to whom DAT> ’ Zofia Nałkowska, Medallions The Polish Case marking system The parts of speech that can be declined with different Case endings are: nominal forms, generally nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals, and adjectival participles (which decline like adjectives). The parts of speech that are generally not declined with different Case endings— verbal forms —are adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections, verbs, and adverbial participles (which are formed from verbs). Verbs are conjugated with different endings to show mood, tense, class (also referred to as gender, see 3.2.1), number, and person but they are not declined by Case, with the exception of most participles. In Polish there are seven kinds of distinctive relationships, overtly marked on nominal forms. The seven distinctive relationships correspond to the seven Cases in Polish. Table 2.1 Cases in Polish Polish has seven Cases for each number—singular and plural—thus a total of 14 forms for each fully developed nominal form. Some words have only singular forms (also called singularia tantum) or only plural forms (pluralia tantum)...
eBook - ePub- Maggie Tallerman(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...To show that these concepts are valid, we need to demonstrate that certain linguistic phenomena are best described in terms of ‘subject’ or ‘object’. For languages in the nominative/accusative class, it’s clear that ‘subject’ and ‘object’ are valid categories: in the last few sections we’ve seen a number of illustrations of both Case and verb agreement operating in terms of subject vs. object alignment. The examples seen so far show that certain languages are morphologically nominative/accusative. This means that the characteristic AS/O alignment is indicated by changes in the morphology (form) of the NPs, via Case marking, or in the morphology of the head verb, via agreement, or indeed by marking on both NPs and verbs. However, the AS/O pattern is also pervasive in syntax itself. This means that many languages – including those with no Case marking or even with ergative Case marking – are syntactically nominative/accusative. In such languages there are a number of syntactic processes which revolve around the subject and object relations – in fact, particularly the subject, since this grammatical relation is by far the most important. We’ll examine some of these processes in this section, and return to this topic in Chapter 7. The subject relation is crucial cross-linguistically: subjects tend to control the syntax in a number of ways, as we’ll see. However, it’s hard to give a satisfactory definition of ‘subject’, because no single property is shared by all subjects in all languages. Instead, there’s a set of properties typical of subjects, and each language is likely to exhibit a subset of these properties...
eBook - ePub- Diane C. Nelson(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In this model of grammar, Case is assigned to encode grammatical function according to a hierarchy which is mapped from left to right onto the NPs of a given clause: Where an NP (or adverbial) is unavailable for mapping onto a Case-Tier, a ‘shift’ occurs so that the appropriate Case gets assigned to the next available NP. The Case-Tier is applied to Finnish in Maling (1993), who attempts to account for the familiar grammatical Case data as well as the complex Case patterns that appear when a verb is modified by several adverbials (data from Maling 1993:59): In (59a) above, where agreement morphology is present on the verb, both adverbial modifier phrases are assigned accusative Case. In (59b), the impersonal passive verb assigns zero-accusative Case to one of the adverbial modifiers, the duration phrase, while the frequency phrase gets accusative Case, regardless of the linear order of the constituents. To account for this ranked assignment of zero-accusative (nominative) Case, she proposes the following version of the Case-Tier which incorporates a hierarchy of Case assignment that extends beyond the core functions usually signalled by grammatical Case (Maling 1993:60): In this system, the zero-accusative Case form is taken to be an instance of nominative, rather than accusative Case, assigned to the highest GF in a given sentence. Although Maling’s hierarchy successfully predicts the assignment of multiple accusatives in a single sentence (which is ruled out by Vainikka’s 1989c analysis), she is forced to make minor stipulations to account for instances of multiple nominative elements in a sentence. Another recent model of Case assignment in Finnish, Case Position Theory, is proposed by Toivanen (1993). In this theory, each sentence in Finnish of capable of supporting up to 6 positions in a flat, rather than configurational, structure...
