Grammatical Case - Indo-European Languages

Indo-European Languages

While not very prominent in modern English, cases featured much more saliently in Old English and other ancient Indo-European languages, such as Latin, 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, 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 closest living Germanic language to 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:

• The nominative case indicates the subject of a finite verb: We went to the store.
• The accusative case indicates the direct object of a verb: The clerk remembered us.
• The dative case indicates the indirect object of a verb: The clerk gave us a discount. or The clerk gave a discount to us.
• The ablative case indicates movement from something, or cause: The victim went from us to see the doctor. and He was unhappy because of depression.
• The genitive case, which roughly corresponds to English's possessive case and preposition of, indicates the possessor of another noun: John's book was on the table. and The pages of the book turned yellow.
• The vocative case indicates an addressee: John, are you all right? or simply Hello, John!
• The locative case indicates a location: We live in China.
• The instrumental case indicates an object used in performing an action: We wiped the floor with a mop. and Written by hand.

All of the above are just rough descriptions; the precise distinctions vary from language to language, and are often quite complex. Case is based fundamentally on changes to the noun to indicate the noun's role in the sentence. This is not how English works, where word order and prepositions are used to achieve this.

Modern English has largely abandoned the inflectional case system of 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 genitive clitic -'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(s), our(s)), used for a grammatical possessor.

Most English personal pronouns have five forms; in addition to the nominative and oblique case forms, the possessive case has both a determiner form (such as my, our) and a distinct independent form (such as mine, ours) (with the exceptions that these are not distinct for the third person singular masculine and that the third person singular neuter it does not have the possessive independent form); and they have a distinct reflexive or intensive form (such as myself, ourselves). 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 whosoever).

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'). Note that chair does not change form between "the chair is here" (subject) and "I saw the chair" (direct object), a distinction made by word order and context.