Grammatical case
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A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and numerals) that corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording.[1] In various languages, nominal groups consisting of a noun and its modifiers belong to one of a few such categories. For instance, in English, one says I see them and they see me: the nominative pronouns I / they represent the perceiver, and the accusative pronouns me/them represent the phenomenon perceived. Here, nominative and accusative are cases, that is, categories of pronouns corresponding to the functions they have in representation.
English has largely lost its inflected case system but personal pronouns still have three cases, which are simplified forms of the nominative, accusative (including functions formerly handled by the dative), and genitive cases. They are used with personal pronouns: subjective case (I, you, he, she, it, we, they, who, whoever), objective case (me, you, him, her, it, us, them, whom, whomever), and possessive case (my, mine; your, yours; his; her, hers; its; our, ours; their, theirs; whose; whosever).[2][3] Forms such as I, he, and we are used for the subject ("I kicked John"), and forms such as me, him, and us are used for the object ("John kicked me").
As a language evolves, cases can merge (for instance, in Ancient Greek, the locative case merged with the dative), a phenomenon known as syncretism.[4]
Languages such as Sanskrit, Latin, and Russian have extensive case systems, with nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and determiners all inflecting (usually by means of different suffixes) to indicate their case. The number of cases differs between languages: For example, modern Standard Arabic and modern English have three, but only for pronouns; Hungarian is among those with the most, with its 18 cases.
Commonly encountered cases include nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. A role that one of those languages marks by case is often marked in English with a preposition. For example, the English prepositional phrase with (his) foot (as in "John kicked the ball with his foot") might be rendered in Russian using a single noun in the instrumental case, or in Ancient Greek as τῷ ποδί (tôi podí, meaning "the foot") with both words – the definite article, and the noun πούς (poús) "foot" – changing to dative form.
More formally, case has been defined as "a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their heads".[5]: 1 Cases should be distinguished from thematic roles such as agent and patient. They are often closely related, and in languages such as Latin, several thematic roles are realised by a somewhat fixed case for deponent verbs, but cases are a syntagmatic / phrasal category, and thematic roles are the function of a syntagma / phrase in a larger structure. Languages having cases often exhibit free word order, as thematic roles are not required to be marked by position in the sentence.
- ^ Frede, Michael (1994). "The Stoic notion of a grammatical case". Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. 39: 12–24. doi:10.1111/j.2041-5370.1994.tb00449.x. JSTOR 43646836.
- ^ "Whosever". Merriam-Webster (online ed.). Archived from the original on 13 June 2021. Retrieved 22 February 2021.
Definition of 'Whosever' by Merriam-Webster.
- ^ The Chambers Dictionary (11th ed.).
- ^ Clackson 2007, p. 91.
- ^ Blake, Barry J. (2001). Case. Cambridge University Press. pp. 1, 89, 167–174.