Grammatical case
A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers that 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 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, objective case, and possessive case. Forms such as I, he, and we are used for the subject, and forms such as me, him, and us are used for the object.
As a language evolves, cases can merge, a phenomenon known as syncretism.
Languages such as Sanskrit, Latin, and Russian have extensive case systems, with nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and determiners all inflecting 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 foot might be rendered in Russian using a single noun in the instrumental case, or in Ancient Greek as 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". 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. 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 Library of Alexandria.Aristotle recognized the gender of nouns and their related endings, but it was with the Stoics and, subsequently, with the grammarians of the Hellenistic period that a systematic and complete grouping of the morphology of nouns and their declensions in Ancient Greek was achieved. Of particular importance is the work of Dionysius Thrax The Art of Grammar, which represents the first true grammar in the modern sense ever written about an Indo-European language and its structure. In addition to the definition of case and its structure, this work contains most of today's grammatical elements and structures.
Etymology
The English word case used in this sense comes from the Latin casus, 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 and in German. The Russian word паде́ж 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 Dutch equivalent translates as 'noun case', in which 'noun' has the older meaning of both 'adjective ' and ' noun'. The Finnish equivalent is, whose main meaning is "position" or "place".
Similar to Latin, Sanskrit uses the term विभक्ति ' which may be interpreted as the specific or distinct "bendings" or "experiences" of a word, from the verb भुज् ' and the prefix वि , and names the individual cases using ordinal numbers.
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, although 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, with most having six to eight cases, as well as Icelandic, German, Irish 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 the most conservative Germanic language.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, John, dodo | We went to the store. John is an avid reader. The dodo are an extinct species. | Who or what? | Corresponds to English's subject pronouns. |
| Accusative | Direct object of a transitive verb | us, for us, the | The clerk remembered us. John ate the apple at the bus stop. John waited for us at the parking lot. Obey the law. | Whom or what? | Corresponds to English's object pronouns. Together with dative, it forms modern English's oblique case. |
| Dative | Indirect object of a verb | us, to us, to the | The clerk gave us a discount. The clerk gave a discount to us. According to the law, this is illegal. | To whom or what? | Corresponds to English's object pronouns and preposition to and for constructions before the object, both 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 | John's book was on the table. The pages of the book turned yellow. The table is made out of wood. | Whose? From what or what of? | Roughly corresponds to English's possessive and preposition of construction. |
| Vocative | Addressee | John, O foolish dreamer, Madam Chair, | John, are you all right? Now, ladies and gentlemen, we are proud to present… O Canada, we stand on guard for thee | – | Indicates the addressee. Roughly corresponds to the formal, poetic or reverential 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 utilized in/while performing an action | with a mop, by hand, through a tunnel | We wiped the floor with a mop. This letter was written by hand. The inmates escaped through a tunnel. | How? With what or using what? By what means? | 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. For other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, grammatical function is indicated only by word order, by prepositions, and by the "Saxon genitive".Taken as a whole, English personal pronouns are typically said to have three morphological cases:
- The nominative case, used for the subject of a finite verb and sometimes for the complement of a copula.
- The oblique case, 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, used for a grammatical possessor. This is not always considered to be a case; see.
Although English pronouns can have subject and object forms, nouns show only a singular/plural and a possessive/non-possessive distinction ; there is no manifest difference in the form of chair between "The chair is here." and "I own the chair.", a distinction made instead by word order and context.