Grammatical case


"Case" is a linguistics term regarding a manner of categorizing nouns, pronouns, adjectives, participles, and numerals according to their traditionally corresponding grammatical functions within a given phrase, clause, or sentence. In some languages, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, determiners, participles, prepositions, numerals, articles and their modifiers take different inflected forms, depending on their case. As a language evolves, cases can merge, a phenomenon formally called syncretism.
English has largely lost its inflected case system although 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.
Languages such as Ancient Greek, Armenian, Assamese, most Balto-Slavic languages, Basque, most Caucasian languages, most Dravidian languages, German, Icelandic, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Sanskrit, Tibetan, the Turkic languages and the Uralic languages have extensive case systems, with nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and determiners all inflecting to indicate their case. The number of cases differs between languages: Persian and Esperanto have two; modern English has three but for pronouns only; Modern Standard and Classical forms of Arabic have three; German, Icelandic, and Irish have four; Romanian has five; Latin, Slovenian, Russian and Turkish each have at least six; Armenian, Czech, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak and Ukrainian have seven; Sanskrit and Tamil have eight; Assamese has 10; 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 foot might be rendered in Russian using a single noun in the instrumental case, or in Ancient Greek as τῷ ποδί with both words 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 have an associated case, but cases are a morphological notion, and thematic roles a semantic one. 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 casus, which is derived from the verb, "to fall", from the Proto-Indo-European root '. The Latin word is a calque of the Greek πτῶσις,, 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 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 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, 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:
CaseIndicatesSample case wordsSample sentenceInterrogativeNotes
NominativeSubject of a finite verbweWe went to the store.Who or what?Corresponds to English's subject pronouns.
AccusativeDirect object of a transitive verbus,
for us,
the 		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.
DativeIndirect object of a verbus,
to us,
to the 		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.
AblativeMovement away fromfrom usThe pigeon flew from us to a steeple.Whence? From where/whom?
GenitivePossessor of another noun's,
of,
his		John's book was on the table.
The pages of the book turned yellow.
Table made out of wood.
To each his own.		Whose? From what or what of?Roughly corresponds to English's possessive and preposition of construction.
VocativeAddresseeJohnJohn, are you all right?
Hello, John!
LocativeLocation, either physical or temporalin 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.
InstrumentalA means or tool used or companion present in/while performing an actionwith 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. 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:
Most English personal pronouns have five forms: the nominative and oblique case forms, the possessive case, which has both a determiner form and a distinct independent form , and a distinct reflexive or intensive form. The interrogative personal pronoun who exhibits the greatest diversity of forms within the modern English pronoun system, having definite nominative, oblique, and genitive forms and equivalently coordinating indefinite forms.
Though English pronouns can have subject and object forms, nouns show only a singular/plural and a possessive/non-possessive distinction. Note that chair does not change form between "the chair is here" and "I saw the chair", a distinction made 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:
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 much of these languages still retain vocative, locative, and ablative cases. Old English had an instrumental case, but not a locative or prepositional.

Case order

The traditional case order 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:
numbercasemasculinefeminineneuterneuter
singularhatturborgglasgler
singularhattborgglasgler
singularhattiborgglasigleri
singularhattsborgarglassglers
pluralhattarborgirglösgler
pluralhattaborgirglösgler
pluralhöttumborgumglösumglerum
pluralhattaborgaglasaglera

Case concord systems

In the most common case concord system, only the head-word 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 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 and another case such as accusative.

Declension paradigms

Declension is the process or result of altering nouns to the correct grammatical cases. Languages with rich nominal inflection 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. For example, Slovak has fifteen noun declension classes, five for each gender.
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:
vs.
and

Assamese

has ten cases.
EnglishSignificanceUsual SuffixesTransliteration of SuffixesExample with চুলি
AbsolutiveSubject of sentenceØØsuli
ErgativeAgentএ, ইe, isulie
AccusativeObject of actionঅক / ক ; Ø ok / k; Øsulik; suli
GenitivePossessiveঅৰor / rsulir
DativeObject to whom action is performedঅক / কok / ksulik
Dative of motion formObject for whom action is performedঅলৈ / লৈoloi / loisuliloi
Terminativeঅলৈকে / লৈকেoloike / loikesuliloike
Instrumental of motion fromMeans by which action is doneএৰে / ৰেere / resulire
LocativePlace in which, On the person of in the presence ofঅত / তot / tsulit
VocativeAddressing, callingঅ, Ø, হেo, Ø, heo suli!, suli!, he suli!

Australian Aboriginal Languages

represent a diversity of case paradigms in terms of their alignment 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. Dench and Evans 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 :
  1. Relational: a suffix which represents syntactic or semantic roles of a noun phrase in clauses.
  2. Adnominal: a suffix which relates a noun phrase to another within the one noun phrase.
  3. 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.
  4. Subordinating: a suffix which attaches to elements of a subordinate clause. Its functions are: specifying temporal or logical relationships between two clauses ; indicating coreferential relationships between arguments in the two clauses.
  5. Derivational: a suffix which attaches to a bare stem before other case suffixses 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 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. See the following examples respectively:
Bardi
Wangkatja

Belarusian

An example of a Belarusian case inflection is given below, using the singular forms of the Belarusian term for "country", which belongs to Belarusian's first declension class.
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 and one of the German words for "sailor".
An example with the feminine definite article with the German word for "woman".
  • die Frau "the woman"
  • der Frau "the woman's / the woman"
  • der Frau " the woman"
  • die Frau "the woman"
An example with the neuter definite article with the German word for "book".
has four cases: nominative, genitive, accusative, and vocative. For neuters and most groups of feminines and plural masculines, the genitive case differs from the other three. Below is an example of the declension of , which has a different form in the singular of all four cases, together with the appropriate article in both the singular and the plural:
Ancient Greek had one additional case, the dative. At some point, it was replaced with the preposition εις, followed by the accusative. This became necessary when pronunciation simplified, merging the two long vowels eta and omega to short. The result was that dative did not sound much different from the accusative in the singular of the first two groups. However, the dative case is still used in many expressions.
With time, only the sigma of εις was left and got attached to the article, except when an article is not used and it becomes σε instead. Note that this is not a different case from the accusative.
Below is an example with the dative case of the word πόλη :
Hindi has three noun cases, the nominative, the oblique, and the vocative case. The other cases are formed using the primary postpositions of Hindi with nouns and pronouns in the oblique cases. The pronoun cases that Hindi have are the nominative, the accusative, the dative, the genitive, and three oblique cases. The Oblique - Regular case is used with the primary postpositions of Hindi, Oblique - Ergative is used with the ergative marker ने and the Oblique - Genitive case is used with the secondary postpositions. The pronouns shown in sqaure brackets in the pronoun case table shown below do not have true case forms and they are instead formed by adding the primary genitive postpositions का, के, की to the oblique - regular pronoun case.

Japanese

Cases in Japanese are marked by particles placed after the nouns. A distinctive feature of Japanese is the presence of two cases, which are roughly equivalent to the nominative case in other languages: one representing the sentence topic, the other representing the subject. The most important case markers are the following:
Cases in Korean are marked by particles placed after the nouns, similar to Japanese. Like Japanese, the nominative case has two distinctions, one representing the topic of a sentence and the other the subject. In informal speech, nominative and accusative particles are often omitted, while dative and ablative are shortened to simply 에, if the meaning of the sentence can easily be inferred from context. Most common case markers are the following:
An example of a Latin case inflection is given below, using the singular forms of the Latin term for "cook", which belongs to.
nouns have seven grammatical cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative. The instrumental case is always identical to the accusative in the singular and to the dative in the plural. It is used as a free-standing case only in highly restricted contexts in modern Latvian.
An example of a Latvian case inflection is given below, using the singular forms of the Latvian term for "man", which belongs to the first declension class.
In Lithuanian, only the inflection usually changes in the seven different grammatical cases:
forms are given in parentheses after the nominative, as the only pronominal vocatives that are used are the third person ones, which only occur in compounds.

Polish

An example of a Polish case inflection is given below, using the singular forms of the Polish terms for "human" and "monkey"
declension is relatively simple with regular suffixes attached to the vast majority of nouns. The following table lists all of the cases used in Hungarian.
CaseMeaningSuffixExampleMeaning of the example
Nominative casesubjectházhouse
Accusative casedirect object-ot//-et/-öt/-tházathouse
Dative caseindirect object-nak/-nekháznakto the house
Genitive casepossession-éházéof the house
Instrumental-comitative casewith-val/-vel házzalwith the house
Causal-final casefor, for the purpose of-értházértfor the house
Translative caseinto -vá/-vé házzá into a house
Terminative caseas far as, up to-igházigas far as the house
Illative caseinto -ba/-beházbainto the house
Adessive caseat-nál/-nélháználat the house
Ablative casefrom-tól/-tölháztólfrom the house
Sublative caseonto -ra/-reházraonto the house
Superessive caseon/upon -n/-on/-en/-önházonon top of the house
Delative casefrom -ról/-rölházrólaway from the house
Temporal caseat -korkettőkorat two
Sociative casewith -stul/-stülházastulwith the house
Types oftypes or variants of a thing-félekettőféle háztwo types of houses

Romanian

is the only modern major Romance language with a case system for all nouns, whereas all other Romance languages dropped the cases for nouns replacing them by prepositions. An example of Romanian case inflection is given below, using the singular form of the word "boy":
An example of a Russian case inflection is given below, using the singular forms of the Russian term for "sailor", which belongs to Russian's first declension class.
Up to ten additional cases are identified by linguists, although today all of them are either incomplete or degenerate. The most recognized additional cases are locative, partitive, and two forms of vocative — old and neo-vocative. Sometimes, so called count-form is considered to be a sub-case. See details.

Sanskrit

Grammatical case was analyzed extensively in Sanskrit. The grammarian Pāṇini identified six semantic roles or kāraka, which by default are related to the following eight Sanskrit cases in order:
OrderDefault thematic roleEnglish caseExample with राम
Case 1 प्रथमाKartṛ Nominativeरामः, रामौ, रामाः
Case 2 द्वितीयाKarman Accusativeरामम्, रामौ, रामान्
Case 3 तृतीयाKaraṇa Instrumentalरामेण, रामाभ्याम्, रामैः
Case 4 चतुर्थीSampradāna Dativeरामाय, रामाभ्याम्, रामेभ्यः
Case 5 पञ्चमीApādāna Ablativeरामात्, रामाभ्याम्, रामेभ्यः
Case 6 षष्ठीSambandhaGenitiveरामस्य, रामयोः, रामाणाम्
Case 7 सप्तमीAdhikaraṇa Locativeरामे, रामयोः, रामेषु
Case 8 सम्बोधनSambodhana Vocativeहे राम, हे रामौ, हे रामाः

For example, in the following sentence leaf is the agent, tree is the source, and ground is the locus. The declensions are reflected in the morphemes -āt, -am, and -au respectively.
However, the cases may be deployed for other than the default thematic roles. A notable example is the passive construction. In the following sentence, Devadatta is the kartā, but appears in the instrumental case, and rice, the karman, object, is in the nominative case. The declensions are reflected in the morphemes -ena and -am.

Tamil

The Tamil case system is analyzed in native and missionary grammars as consisting of a finite number of cases. The usual treatment of Tamil case is one in which there are seven cases: nominative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive, and locative. In traditional analyses, there is always a clear distinction made between post-positional morphemes and case endings. The vocative is sometimes given a place in the case system as an eighth case, but vocative forms do not participate in usual morphophonemic alternations and do not govern the use of any postpositions. Modern grammarians, however, argue that this eight-case classification is coarse and artificial and that Tamil usage is best understood if each suffix or combination of suffixes is seen as marking a separate case.
TamilEnglishSignificanceUsual suffixesSuffixes in TamilExample
First caseNominativeSubject of sentencemannan
Second case AccusativeObject of action-aiஐmannanai
Third case Instrumental, SocialMeans by which action is done, Association, or means by which action is done -al, -udan, -konduஆல், உடன், கொண்டுmannanaal, mannanudan, mannanOdu,
Fourth caseDativeObject to whom action is performed, Object for whom action is performedkku. poruttu, aagaகு, பொருட்டு, ஆகmannanukku, mannanin poruttu, mannanukkaaga
Fifth caseAblative of motion fromMotion from an animate/inanimate object-in, -il, -ilrunduஇன், இல், இருந்துmannanin, mannanil, mannanilirundu
Sixth caseGenitivePossessiveathu, udaiyaஅது, உடையmannanadu, mannanudaiya
Seventh caseLocativePlace in which, On the person of in the presence of-il, -idam; kaṇ இல், இடம்; கண் vīṭṭil, mannanidam ; பூரியார்கண் = கீழோரிடம்; பற்றற்றகண்ணும் = செல்வமில்லாத நிலையிலும்
Eighth case VocativeAddressing, callinge, aஏ, ஆmannanE, mannavaa

Telugu

has eight cases.

Turkish

Modern Turkish has five cases.
Accusative
What? Who?		Dative
To who?		Locative
Where? Who?		Ablative
Where from? From who? Why?		Genitive
Whose? What's wrong?
çiçeği / the flowerçiçeğe / to flowerçiçekte / in flowerçiçekten / from flowerçiçeğin / of flower


The accusative can exist not only in the noun but also in the verb. For example, Arkadaşlar bize gelmeyi düşünüyorlar./Friends are thinking of coming to us.
The dative can exist not only in the noun but also in the verb. For example, Bol bol kitap okumaya çalışıyorum./I try to read a lot of books.

Ukrainian

An example of a Ukrainian case inflection is given below, using the singular forms of the Ukrainian word "мрія", which is a soft feminine noun of the first declension class.
As languages evolve, case systems change. In early Ancient Greek, for example, the genitive and ablative cases became combined, giving five cases, rather than the six retained in Latin. In modern Hindi, the Sanskrit cases have been reduced to three: a direct case and oblique case, and a vocative case. In English, apart from the pronouns discussed above, case has vanished altogether except for the possessive/non-possessive dichotomy in nouns.
The evolution of the treatment of case relationships can be circular. Adpositions can become unstressed and sound like they are an unstressed syllable of a neighboring word. A postposition can thus merge into the stem of a head noun, developing various forms depending on the phonological shape of the stem. Affixes can then be subject to various phonological processes such as assimilation, vowel centering to the schwa, phoneme loss, and fusion, and these processes can reduce or even eliminate the distinctions between cases. Languages can then compensate for the resulting loss of function by creating adpositions, thus coming full circle.
Recent experiments in agent-based modeling have shown how case systems can emerge and evolve in a population of language users. The experiments demonstrate that language users may introduce new case markers to reduce the cognitive effort required for semantic interpretation, hence facilitating communication through language. Case markers then become generalized through analogical reasoning and reuse.

Linguistic typology

Morphosyntactic alignment

Languages are categorized into several case systems, based on their morphosyntactic alignment—how they group verb agents and patients into cases:
The following are systems that some languages use to mark case instead of, or in addition to, declension:
The lemma form of words, which is the form chosen by convention as the canonical form of a word, is usually the most unmarked or basic case, which is typically the nominative, trigger, or absolutive case, whichever a language may have.

General references