Grammatical case
| A Grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. 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. | |
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| wikipedia:: Grammatical case |
The eight historical Indo-European cases are as follows, with examples either of the English case or of the English syntactic alternative to case:
| Case | Indicates | Sample case words | Sample sentence | Interrogative | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nominative | Subject of a finite verb | we | We went to the store. | Who or what? | Corresponds to English's subject pronouns. |
| Accusative | Direct object of a transitive verb | us, for us, the (object) |
The clerk remembered us. John waited for us at the bus stop. Obey the law. |
Whom or what? | Corresponds to English's object pronouns and preposition for_construction before the object, often marked by a definite article _the. Together with dative, it forms modern English's oblique case. |
| Dative | Indirect objectof a verb | us, to us, to the (object) |
The clerk gave us a discount. The clerk gave a discount to us. According to the law... |
Whom or to what? | Corresponds to English's object pronouns and preposition to_construction before the object, often marked by a definite article _the. Together with accusative, it forms modern English's oblique case. |
| Ablative | Movement away from | from us | The pigeon flew from us to a steeple. | Whence? From where/whom? | |
| Genitive | Possessor of another noun | 's, of (the) |
John's book was on the table. The pages of the bookturned yellow. The table is made out of wood. |
Whose? From what or what of? | Roughly corresponds to English's possessive (possessive determiners and pronouns) and preposition _of_construction. |
| Vocative | Addressee | John | John, are you all right? Hello, John! O John, how are you! (Archaic) |
Roughly corresponds to the archaic use of "O" in English. | |
| Locative | Location, either physical or temporal | in Japan, at the bus stop, in the future |
We live in Japan. John is waiting for us at the bus stop. We will see what will happen in the future. |
Where or wherein? When? | Roughly corresponds to English prepositions in, on, at, and by and other less common prepositions. |
| Instrumental | A means or tool used or companion present in/while performing an action | with a mop, by hand |
We wiped the floor with a mop. This letter was written by hand. |
How? With what or using what? By what means? With whom? | Corresponds to English prepositions by, with and via as well as synonymous constructions such as using, by use of and through. |
All of the above are just rough descriptions; the precise distinctions vary significantly from language to language, and as such they are often more complex. Case is based fundamentally on changes to the noun to indicate the noun's role in the sentence – one of the defining features of so-called fusional languages. Old English was a fusional language, but Modern English does not work this way.
Modern English
Modern English has largely abandoned the inflectional case system of Proto-Indo-European in favor of analytic constructions. The personal pronouns of Modern English retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class (a remnant of the more extensive case system of Old English). For other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, grammatical function is indicated only by word order, by prepositions, and by the "Saxon genitive" (-'s).a(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case#cite_note-17)
Taken as a whole, English personal pronouns are typically said to have three morphological cases:
- The nominative case (subjective pronouns such as I, he, she, we), used for the subject of a finite verb and sometimes for the complement of a copula.
- The oblique case (object pronouns such as me, him, her, us), used for the direct or indirect object of a verb, for the object of a preposition, for an absolute disjunct, and sometimes for the complement of a copula.
- The genitive case (possessive pronouns such as my/mine, his, her/hers, our/ours), used for a grammatical possessor. This is not always considered to be a case; see English possessive § Status of the possessive as a grammatical case.
Most English personal pronouns have five forms: the nominative case form, the oblique case form, a distinct reflexive or intensive form (such as myself, ourselves) which is based upon the possessive determiner form but is coreferential to a preceding instance of nominative or oblique, and the possessive case forms, which include both a [determiner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determiner(linguistics) "Determiner (linguistics)") form (such as _my, our) and a predicatively-used independent form (such as mine, ours) which is distinct (with two exceptions: the third person singular masculine he and the third person singular neuter it, which use the same form for both determiner and independent [his car, it is his]). The interrogative personal pronoun who exhibits the greatest diversity of forms within the modern English pronoun system, having definite nominative, oblique, and genitive forms (who, whom, whose) and equivalently-coordinating indefinite forms (whoever, whomever, and whosever).
Although English pronouns can have subject and object forms (he/him, she/her), nouns show only a singular/plural and a possessive/non-possessive distinction (e.g. chair, chairs, chair's, chairs'); there is no manifest difference in the form of chair between "The chair is here." (subject) and "I own the chair." (direct object), a distinction made instead by word order and context.