case (language)

A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and numerals), 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.

English has largely lost its inflected case system but personal pronouns still have three cases, which are simplified forms of the nominative, accusative 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). Forms such as ''I'', ''he'' and ''we'' are used for the subject ("I kicked the ball"), 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 case), a phenomenon officially called syncretism.

Languages such as Latin, Tamil, Russian and German 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: Persian has two; modern English has three but for pronouns only; Torlakian dialects, Classical and Modern Standard Arabic have three; German, Icelandic, Modern Greek, and Irish have four; Romanian and Ancient Greek have five; Bengali, Latin, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, and Turkish each have at least six; Armenian, Czech, Georgian, Kajkavian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Serbian, Croatian and Ukrainian have seven; Mongolian, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Greenlandic have eight; Assamese has 10; Basque has 13; Estonian has 14; Finnish has 15; Hungarian has 18 and Tsez has 64 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 (, meaning "the foot") with both words (the definite article, and the noun () "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".Blake, Barry J. ''Case''. Cambridge University Press: 2001. 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.

History

It is widely accepted that the Ancient Greeks had a certain idea of the forms of a name in their own language. A fragment of Anacreon seems to prove this. Nevertheless, it cannot be inferred that the Ancient Greeks really knew what grammatical cases were. Grammatical cases were first recognized by the Stoics and from some philosophers of the Peripatetic school. The advancements of those philosophers were later employed by the philologists of the Alexandrian school.

Etymology

The English word ''case'' used in this sense comes from the Latin , which is derived from the verb , "to fall", from the Proto-Indo-European root '' ''. The Latin word is a calque of the Greek , , lit. "falling, fall". The sense is that all other cases are considered to have "fallen" away from the nominative. This imagery is also reflected in the word ''declension'', from Latin , "to lean", from the PIE root '' ''.

The equivalent to "case" in several other European languages also derives from ''casus'', including in French, in Italian, in Spanish, in Portuguese and in German. The Russian word (''padyézh'') is a calque from Greek and similarly contains a root meaning "fall", and the German and Czech simply mean "fall", and are used for both the concept of grammatical case and to refer to physical falls. The Finnish equivalent is , whose main meaning is "position" or "place".

Indo-European languages

Although not very prominent in modern English, cases featured much more saliently in Old English and other ancient Indo-European languages, such as Latin, Old Persian, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit. Historically, the Indo-European languages had eight morphological cases, though modern languages typically have fewer, using prepositions and word order to convey information that had previously been conveyed using distinct noun forms. Among modern languages, cases still feature prominently in most of the Balto-Slavic languages (except Macedonian and Bulgarian), with most having six to eight cases, as well as Icelandic, German and Modern Greek, which have four. In German, cases are mostly marked on articles and adjectives, and less so on nouns. In Icelandic, articles, adjectives, personal names and nouns are all marked for case, making it, among other things, the living Germanic language that could be said to most closely resemble Proto-Germanic.

The eight historical Indo-European cases are as follows, with examples either of the English case or of the English syntactic alternative to case:

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'').

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 .

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'' 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'').

Though 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.

Hierarchy of cases

Cases can be ranked in the following hierarchy, where a language that does not have a given case will tend not to have any cases to the right of the missing case:

: nominative → accusative ''or'' ergative → genitive → dative → locative ''or'' prepositional → ablative ''and/or'' instrumental → ''others''.

This is, however, only a general tendency. Many forms of Central German, such as Colognian and Luxembourgish, have a dative case but lack a genitive. In Irish nouns, the nominative and accusative have fallen together, whereas the dative–locative has remained separate in some paradigms; Irish also has genitive and vocative cases. In many modern Indo-Aryan languages, the accusative, genitive, and dative have merged to an oblique case, but many of these languages still retain vocative, locative, and ablative cases. Old English had an instrumental case, but neither a locative nor a prepositional case.

Case order

The traditional case order (nom-gen-dat-acc) was expressed for the first time in ''The Art of Grammar'' in the 2nd century BC:

Latin grammars, such as ''Ars grammatica'', followed the Greek tradition, but added the ablative case of Latin. Later other European languages also followed that Graeco-Roman tradition.

However, for some languages, such as Latin, due to case syncretism the order may be changed for convenience, where the accusative or the vocative cases are placed after the nominative and before the genitive. For example:

For similar reasons, the customary order of the four cases in Icelandic is nominative–accusative–dative–genitive, as illustrated below:

Case concord systems

In the most common case concord system, only the head-word (the noun) in a phrase is marked for case. This system appears in many Papuan languages as well as in Turkic, Mongolian, Quechua, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, and other languages. In Basque and various Amazonian and Australian languages, only the phrase-final word (not necessarily the noun) is marked for case. In many Indo-European, Finnic, and Semitic languages, case is marked on the noun, the determiner, and usually the adjective. Other systems are less common. In some languages, there is double-marking of a word as both genitive (to indicate semantic role) and another case such as accusative (to establish concord with the head noun).

Declension paradigms

Declension is the process or result of altering nouns to the correct grammatical cases. Languages with rich nominal inflection (using grammatical cases for many purposes) typically have a number of identifiable declension classes, or groups of nouns with a similar pattern of case inflection or declension. Sanskrit has six declension classes, whereas Latin is traditionally considered to have five, and Ancient Greek three.Frank Beetham, ''Learning Greek with Plato'', Bristol Phoenix Press, 2007. For example, Slovak has fifteen noun declension classes, five for each gender (the number may vary depending on which paradigms are counted or omitted, this mainly concerns those that modify declension of foreign words; refer to article).

In Indo-European languages, declension patterns may depend on a variety of factors, such as gender, number, phonological environment, and irregular historical factors. Pronouns sometimes have separate paradigms. In some languages, particularly Slavic languages, a case may contain different groups of endings depending on whether the word is a noun or an adjective. A single case may contain many different endings, some of which may even be derived from different roots. For example, in Polish, the genitive case has ''-a, -u, -ów, -i/-y, -e-'' for nouns, and ''-ego, -ej, -ich/-ych'' for adjectives. To a lesser extent, a noun's animacy or humanness may add another layer of complexity. For example, in Russian:

* Кот () (NOM, animate, zero ending) ловит мышей () ((The) cat catches mice)
* Столб () (NOM, inanimate, zero ending) держит крышу () ((The) pillar holds a/the roof)
vs.
* Пётр гладит кота () (ACC, animate, -a ending). (Peter strokes a/the cat)
and
* Пётр ломает столб () (ACC, inanimate, zero ending). (Peter breaks a/the pillar)

Examples

Australian Aboriginal Languages

Australian languages represent a diversity of case paradigms in terms of their alignment (i.e. nominative-accusative vs. ergative-absolutive) and the morpho-syntactic properties of case inflection including where/how many times across a noun phrase the case morphology will appear. For typical r-expression noun phrases, most Australian languages follow a basic ERG-ABS template with additional cases for peripheral arguments; however, many Australian languages, the function of case marking extends beyond the prototypical function of specifying the syntactic and semantic relation of an NP to a predicate.Senge, Chikako. 2015. ''A Grammar of Wanyjirra, a language of Northern Australia''. The Australian National University Ph.D. Dench and Evans (1988) use a five-part system for categorizing the functional roles of case marking in Australian languages. They are enumerated below as they appear in Senge (2015):

# Relational: a suffix which represents syntactic or semantic roles of a noun phrase in clauses.
# Adnominal: a suffix which relates a noun phrase to another within the one noun phrase.
# Referential: a suffix which attaches to a noun phrase in agreement with another noun phrase which represents one of the core arguments in the clause.
# Subordinating: a suffix which attaches to elements of a subordinate clause. Its functions are: (i) specifying temporal or logical (typically, causal and purposive) relationships between two clauses (Temporal-subordinator); (ii) indicating coreferential relationships between arguments in the two clauses (Concord-subordinator).
# Derivational: a suffix which attaches to a bare stem before other case suffixes and create a new lexical item.

To illustrate this paradigm in action, take the case-system of Wanyjirra for whose description Senge invokes this system. Each of the case markers functions in the prototypical relational sense, but many extend into these additional functions:

Wanyjirra is an example of a language in which case marking occurs on all sub-constituents of the NP; see the following example in which the demonstrative, head, and quantifier of the noun phrase all receive ergative marking:

However, this is by no means always the case or even the norm for Australian languages. For many, case-affixes are considered special-clitics (i.e. phrasal-affixes, see Anderson 2005) because they have a singular fixed position within the phrase. For Bardi, the case marker usually appears on the first phrasal constituent while the opposite is the case for Wangkatja (i.e. the case marker is attracted to the rightmost edge of the phrase). See the following examples respectively:

Bardi

Wangkatja

Basque

Basque has the following cases, with examples given in the indefinite, definite singular, definite plural, and definite close plural of the word ''etxe'', "house", "home":

* absolutive (''etxe, etxea, etxeak, etxeok'': "house, the / a house, (the / some) houses, these houses"),
* ergative (''etxek, etxeak, etxeek, etxeok''),
* dative (''etxeri, etxeari, etxeei, etxeoi''),
* genitive (''etxeren, etxearen, etxeen, etxeon''),
* destinative (or benefactive: ''etxerentzat, etxearentzat, etxeentzat, etxeontzat''),
* motivative (or causal: ''etxerengatik, etxearengatik, etxeengatik, etxeongatik''),
* sociative (''etxerekin, etxearekin, etxeekin, etxeokin''),
* instrumental (''etxez, etxeaz, etxeez, etxeoz''),
* locative or inesive (''etxetan, etxean, etxeetan, etxeotan''),
* ablative (''etxetatik, etxetik, exteetatik, etxeotatik''),
* adlative (''etxetara, etxera, etxeetara, etxeotara''),
* directional adlative (''etxetarantz, etxerantz, etxeetarantz, etxeotarantz''),
* terminative adlative (''etxetaraino, etxeraino, etxeetaraino, etxeotaraino''),
* locative genitive (''etxetako, etxeko, etxeetako, etxeotako''),
* prolative (etxetzat), only in the indefinite grammatical number,
* partitive (etxerik), only in the indefinite grammatical number, and
* distributive (''Bost liburu ikasleko banatu dituzte'', "They have handed out five books to each student"), only in the indefinite grammatical number.

Some of them can be re-declined, even more than once, as if they were nouns (usually, from the genitive locative case), although they mainly work as noun modifiers before a noun clause:

* ''etxearena'' (that which is of the house), ''etxearenarekin'' (with the one which pertains to the house),
* ''neskarentzako'' (which is for the girl), ''neskarentzakoan'' (in the one which is for the girl),
* ''neskekiko'' (which is with the girls), ''neskekikoa'' (the one which is for the girls),
* ''arazoarengatiko'' (which is because of the problem), ''arazoarengatikoak'' (the ones which are due to the problems),
* ''zurezkoaz'' (by means of the wooden one),
* ''etxeetakoaz'' (about the one which is in the houses), ''etxeetakoari'' (to the one which is in the houses),
* ''etxetiko'' (which comes from the house), ''etxetikoa'' (the one which comes from the house), etxetikoari (to the one which comes from the house),
* ''etxeetarako'' (which goes to the houses), ''etxeetarakoa'' (the one which goes to the houses), ''etxeetarakoaz'' (about the one which goes to the houses),
* ''etxeranzko'' (which goes towards the house), ''etxeranzkoa'' (the one which goes to the house), ''etxeranzkoarena'' (the one which belongs to the one which goes to the house),
* ''etxerainoko'' (which goes up to the house), ''etxerainokoa'' (the one which goes up to the house), ''etxerainokoarekin'' (with the one which goes up to the houses)...

German

In German, grammatical case is largely preserved in the articles and adjectives, but nouns have lost many of their original endings. Below is an example of case inflection in German using the masculine definite article and one of the German words for "sailor".

* (nominative) "the sailor" s a subject(e.g. ''Der Seemann steht da'' – the sailor is standing there)
* (genitive) "the sailor's / fthe sailor" (e.g. – the name of the sailor is Otto)
* (dative) " o/forthe sailor" s an indirect object(e.g. – I gave a present to the sailor)
* (accusative) "the sailor" s a direct object(e.g. – I saw the sailor)

An example with the feminine definite article with the German word for "woman".

* ''die Frau'' (nominative) "the woman" s a subject(e.g. ''Die Frau isst'' - the woman eats)
* ''der Frau'' (genitive) "the woman's / fthe woman" (e.g. ''Die Katze der Frau ist weiß'' - the cat of the woman is white)
* ''der Frau'' (dative) " o/forthe woman" s an indirect object(e.g. ''Ich gab der Frau ein Geschenk'' - I gave a present to the woman)
* ''die Frau'' (accusative) "the woman" s a direct object(e.g. ''Ich sah die Frau'' - I saw the woman)

An example with the neuter definite article with the German word for "book".

* ''das Buch (nominative)'' "the book" s a subject(e.g. ''Das Buch ist gut -'' the book is good)
* ''des Buch(e)s'' (genitive) "the book's/ fthe book" (e.g. ''Die Seiten des Buchs sind grün'' - the pages of the book are green)
* ''dem Buch(e)'' (dative) " o/forthe book" s an indirect object(e.g. ''Ich gab dem Buch einen Titel'' - I gave the book a title)
* ''das Buch'' (accusative) "the book" s a direct object(e.g. ''Ich sah das Buch'' - I saw the book)

Proper names for cities have two genitive nouns:

* ''der Hauptbahnhof Berlins'' (primary genitive) "the main train station of Berlin"
* ''der Berliner Hauptbahnhof'' (secondary genitive) "Berlin's main train station"

Hindi-Urdu

Hindi-Urdu