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Cases
In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun indicates its grammatical function in a greater phrase or clause; such as the role of subject, of direct object, or of possessor. more...
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While all languages distinguish cases in some fashion, it is only customary to say that a language has cases when these are codified in the morphology of its nouns — that is, when nouns change their form to reflect their case. (Such a change in form is a kind of declension, hence a kind of inflection.) Cases are related to, but distinct from, thematic roles such as agent and patient; while certain cases in each language tend to correspond to certain thematic roles, cases are a syntactic notion whereas thematic roles are a semantic one.
Cases in English
Cases are not very prominent in modern English, except in its personal pronouns (a remnant of the more extensive case system which existed in Old English). For other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, case is indicated only by word order, by prepositions, and by the clitic -'s.
Taken as a whole, English personal pronouns are typically said to have three morphological cases: a subjective case (such as I, he, she, we), used for the subject of a finite verb and sometimes for the complement of a copula; an objective case (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; and a possessive case (such as my/mine, his, her(s), our(s)), used for a grammatical possessor. That said, these pronouns often have more than three forms; the possessive case typically has both a determiner form (such as my, our) and a distinct independent form (such as mine, ours). Additionally, except for the interrogative personal pronoun who, they all have a distinct reflexive or intensive form (such as myself, ourselves).
Simplified illustration of some common case categories
While not very prominent in English, cases feature much more saliently in many other Indo-European languages, such as Latin, Greek, German, Slavic. 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. The eight historic cases are as follows, with examples:
The nominative case, which corresponds to English's subjective case, indicates the subject of a finite verb:
- The man went to the store.
;
The accusative case, which together with the dative and ablative cases (below) corresponds to English's objective case, indicates the direct object of a verb:
- The man bought a car.
;
The dative case indicates the indirect object of a verb:
- The man gave his daughter a book.
;
The ablative case indicates the object of most common prepositions:
- The boy went with his father to see the doctor.
;
The genitive case, which corresponds to English's possessive case, indicates the possessor of another noun:
- A country's citizens must defend its honour.
;
The vocative case indicates an addressee:
- John, are you O.K.?
;
The locative case indicates a location:
- I live in China.
;
The instrumental case indicates an object used in performing an action:
- He shot it with the gun.
;
Read more at Wikipedia.org
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