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Grammatical case
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| Grammatical features |
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A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and numerals) that corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording.[1] 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 (including functions formerly handled by the dative), 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).[2][3] Forms such as I, he, and we are used for the subject ("I kicked John"), 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), a phenomenon known as syncretism.[4]
Languages such as Sanskrit, Latin, and Russian 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: 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 (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 τῷ ποδί (tôi podí, meaning "the foot") with both words – the definite article, and the noun πούς (poús) "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".[5]: 1 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
[edit]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.[6][7] The advancements of those philosophers were later employed by the philologists of the Library of Alexandria.[1][6]
Etymology
[edit]The English word case used in this sense comes from the Latin casus, which is derived from the verb cadere, "to fall", from the Proto-Indo-European root *ḱh₂d-.[8] The Latin word is a calque of the Greek πτῶσις, ptôsis, lit. "falling, fall".[a] 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 declinere, "to lean", from the PIE root *ḱley-.
The equivalent to "case" in several other European languages also derives from casus, including cas in French, caso in Italian and Kasus in German. The Russian word паде́ж (padyézh) is a calque from Greek and similarly contains a root meaning "fall", and the German Fall and Czech pád simply mean "fall", and are used for both the concept of grammatical case and to refer to physical falls. The Dutch equivalent naamval translates as 'noun case', in which 'noun' has the older meaning of both 'adjective (noun)' and '(substantive) noun'. The Finnish equivalent is sija, whose main meaning is "position" or "place".
Similar to Latin, Sanskrit uses the term विभक्ति (vibhakti)[10] which may be interpreted as the specific or distinct "bendings" or "experiences" of a word, from the verb भुज् (bhuj)[11] and the prefix वि (vi),[12] and names the individual cases using ordinal numbers.
Indo-European languages
[edit]
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 (except Macedonian and Bulgarian[13]), 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 (object) |
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 (object) |
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 (the) |
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 (possessive determiners and pronouns) 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
[edit]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).[b]
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 English possessive § Status of the possessive as a grammatical case.
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). The pronoun "where" has a corresponding set of derived forms (whither, whence), but they're considered archaic.
Although 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
[edit]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:[5]: 89
- nominative or absolutive → 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, genitive, and vocative have remained separate. 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 not a locative case.
Case order
[edit]The traditional case order (nom-gen-dat-acc) was expressed for the first time in The Art of Grammar in the 2nd century BCE:
There are five Cases, the right [nominative], the generic [genitive], the dative, the accusative, and the vocative.[20]
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:
| number | case | masculine | feminine | neuter | neuter |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| singular | nom. | hattur | borg | glas | gler |
| acc. | hatt | ||||
| dat. | hatti | glasi | gleri | ||
| gen. | hatts | borgar | glass | glers | |
| plural | nom. | hattar | borgir | glös | gler |
| acc. | hatta | ||||
| dat. | höttum | borgum | glösum | gler(j)um | |
| gen. | hatta | borga | glasa | gler(j)a |
Sanskrit similarly arranges cases in the order nominative-accusative-instrumental-dative-ablative-genitive-locative-vocative. The cases are individually named as the "first," "second," "third", and so on.[10] For example, a common grammatical construction is called the सति सप्तमी (Sati Saptami)[21] or "The Good Seventh" because it uses the locative, which is the seventh case, in a fashion similar to the use of "Upon" in sequential English phrases. (E.g. Upon their arrival, the two were immediately accosted by creditors.)
Case concord systems
[edit]In the most common[5] 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).[22]
Declension paradigms
[edit]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.[23] 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
Kot-∅
cat-NOM.AN.
ловит
lóvit
catches
мышей
myshéy.
mice
(The) cat catches mice.
Столб
Stolb-∅
pillar-NOM.INAN
держит
dérzhit
holds
крышу
krýshu.
roof
(The) pillar holds a/the roof)
vs.
Пётр
Pyotr
Peter
гладит
gládit
strokes
кота
kot-á
cat-ACC.AN
Peter strokes a/the cat
and
Пётр
Pyotr
Peter
ломает
lomáyet
breaks
столб
stolb-∅
pillar-ACC.INAN
Peter breaks a/the pillar
Examples
[edit]Arabic
[edit]An example of a Standard Arabic case inflection is given below, using the singular forms of the Arabic term for "book" كِتَاب kitāb:
- كِتَابُ kitābu (Nominative): الكِتَابُ مُفِيد al-kitābu mufīd – (the book is useful)
- كِتَابَ kitāba (Accusative): إنَّ كِتَابَ العُلُومِ كَبِير ʔinna kitāba al-ʕulūmi kabīr – (the science book is big)
- كِتَابِ kitābi (Genitive): ذَهَبْتُ بِالكِتَابِ ḏahabtu bil-kitābi – (I went with the book)
The modern Arabic colloquial dialects have abandoned the grammatical cases of Classical Arabic, and they are only used nowadays in Modern Standard Arabic. Standard Arabic is the only living Semitic language that preserved the complete Proto-Semitic grammatical cases and declension (ʾIʿrab). In some dialects of Northern and Central Saudi Arabia, one encounters the nunation in the -in form, e.g. دَرْبٍ darbin, "a road" (as in دَرْبٍ طويل darbin ṭiwīl vs. the common colloquial دَرْبْ طويل darb ṭawīl), apparently with the -i- of the former genitive, while -u < -un is preserved in some Yemenite colloquials when the noun is indeterminate (e.g. بَيْتُ baytu, "a house", but al-bayt, "the house").[24]
Australian Aboriginal languages
[edit]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.[25] Dench & Evans (1988)[26] 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):[25]
- 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:
| Derivational | Adnominal | Relational | Referential | Subordinator | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C-SUB* | T-SUB* | |||||
| Ergative | + | + | + | |||
| Dative | + | + | + | + | ||
| Locative | + | + | + | |||
| Allative | + | + | ||||
| Purposive | + | + | ||||
| Ablative | + | |||||
| Elative | + | + | + | + | + | |
| Comitative | + | |||||
| Originative | + | + | ||||
| Proprietive | + | + | + | |||
| Privative | + | + | + | |||
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:
yalu-nggu
DIST-ERG
mawun-du
man-ERG
gujarra-lu
two-ERG
ngu=wula
REAL=3.AUG.SBJ
yunbarn-ana
sing-PRES
junba
corroboree.ABS
Those two men are singing corroboree.
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[27]) because they have a singular fixed position within the phrase. For Bardi, the case marker usually appears on the first phrasal constituent[28] while the opposite is the case for Wangkatja (i.e. the case marker is attracted to the rightmost edge of the phrase).[29] See the following examples respectively:
Boordiji-nim
fat-ERG
niiwandi
tall
aamba
man
i-na-m-boo-na
3-TR-PST-poke-REM.PST
aril
fish
The tall fat man speared a fish.
tjitji
child
warta
tree
purlkana-ngka
big-LOC
nyinarra-nyi
sitting-?
'The child is sitting in the big tree.'
Basque
[edit]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
[edit]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".
- der Seemann (nominative) "the sailor" [as a subject] (e.g. Der Seemann steht da – the sailor is standing there)
- des Seemann(e)s (genitive) "the sailor's / [of] the sailor" (e.g. Der Name des Seemannes ist Otto – the name of the sailor is Otto)
- dem Seemann(e) (dative) "[to/for] the sailor" [as an indirect object] (e.g. Ich gab dem Seemann ein Geschenk – I gave a present to the sailor)
- den Seemann (accusative) "the sailor" [as a direct object] (e.g. Ich sah den Seemann – I saw the sailor)
An example with the feminine definite article with the German word for "woman".
- die Frau (nominative) "the woman" [as a subject] (e.g. Die Frau isst - the woman is eating)
- der Frau (genitive) "the woman's / [of] the woman" (e.g. Die Katze der Frau ist weiß - the cat of the woman is white)
- der Frau (dative) "[to/for] the woman" [as an indirect object] (e.g. Ich gab der Frau ein Geschenk - I gave a present to the woman)
- die Frau (accusative) "the woman" [as 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" [as a subject] (e.g. Das Buch ist gut - the book is good)
- des Buch(e)s (genitive) "the book's/ [of] the book" (e.g. Die Seiten des Buchs sind grün - the pages of the book are green)
- dem Buch(e) (dative) "[to/for] the book" [as an indirect object] (e.g. Ich gab dem Buch einen Titel - I gave the book a title)
- das Buch (accusative) "the book" [as 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
[edit]Hindi-Urdu (Hindustani) has three noun cases, the nominative, oblique, and vocative cases. The vocative case is now obsolete (but still used in certain regions[citation needed]) and the oblique case doubles as the vocative case. The pronoun cases in Hindi-Urdu are the nominative, ergative, accusative, dative, and two oblique cases.[31][32] The case forms which do not exist for certain pronouns are constructed using primary postpositions (or other grammatical particles) and the oblique case (shown in parentheses in the table below).
The other cases are constructed adpositionally using the case-marking postpositions using the nouns and pronouns in their oblique cases. The oblique case is used exclusively with these 8 case-marking postpositions of Hindi-Urdu forming 10 grammatical cases, which are: ergative ने (ne), dative and accusative को (ko), instrumental and ablative से (se), genitive का (kā), inessive में (mẽ), adessive पे (pe), terminative तक (tak), semblative सा (sā).[33]
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| 1 कौन (kaun) is the animate interrogative pronoun and क्या (kyā) is the inanimate interrogative pronoun. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Note: Hindi lacks 3rd person personal pronouns and to compensate the demonstrative pronouns are used as 3rd person personal pronouns. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Latin
[edit]An example of a Latin case inflection is given below, using the singular forms of the Latin term for "cook", which belongs to Latin's second declension class.
- coquus (nominative) "[the] cook" [as a subject] (e.g. coquus ibī stat – the cook is standing there)
- coquī (genitive) "[the] cook's / [of the] cook" (e.g. nōmen coquī Claudius est – the cook's name is Claudius)
- coquō (dative) "[to/for the] cook" [as an indirect object] (e.g. coquō dōnum dedī – I gave a present to the cook)
- coquum (accusative) "[the] cook" [as a direct object] (e.g. coquum vīdī – I saw the cook)
- coquō (ablative) "[by/with/from/in the] cook" [in various uses not covered by the above] (e.g. sum altior coquō – I am taller than the cook: ablative of comparison)
- coque (vocative) "[you] the cook" [addressing the object] (e.g. grātiās tibi agō, coque – I thank you, cook)
For some toponyms, a seventh case, the locative, also exists, such as Mediolānī (in Mediolanum).
The Romance languages have largely abandoned or simplified the grammatical cases of Latin. Much like English, most Romance case markers survive only in pronouns.
Lithuanian
[edit]Typically in Lithuanian, only the inflection changes for the seven different grammatical cases:
- Nominative (vardininkas): šuo – Tai yra šuo – "This is a dog."
- Genitive (kilmininkas): šuns – Tomas paėmė šuns kaulą – "Tom took the dog's bone."
- Dative (naudininkas): šuniui – Jis davė kaulą kitam šuniui – "He gave the bone to another dog."
- Accusative (galininkas): šunį – Jis nuprausė šunį – "He washed the dog."
- Instrumental (įnagininkas): šunimi – Jis šunimi išgąsdino kates – He scared the cats with (using) the dog.
- Locative (vietininkas): šunyje – Susitiksime „Baltame šunyje“ – "We'll meet at the White Dog (Cafe)."
- Vocative (šauksmininkas): šunie – Jis sušuko: Ei, šunie! – "He shouted: Hey, dog!"
Hungarian
[edit]Hungarian 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.
| Case | Meaning | Suffix | Example | Meaning of the example |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nominative case | subject | ∅ | ház | house (as a subject) |
| Accusative case | direct object | -ot/(-at)/-et/-öt/-t | házat | house (as an object) |
| Dative case | indirect object | -nak/-nek | háznak | to the house |
| Genitive case | possession | -é | házé | of the house (belonging to) |
| Instrumental-comitative case | with | -val/-vel (Assim.) | házzal | with the house |
| Causal-final case | for, for the purpose of | -ért | házért | for the house |
| Translative case | into (used to show transformation) | -vá/-vé (Assim.) | házzá | [turn] into a house |
| Terminative case | as far as, up to | -ig | házig | as far as the house |
| Illative case | into (location) | -ba/-be | házba | into the house |
| Adessive case | at | -nál/-nél | háznál | at the house |
| Ablative case | from (away from) | -tól/-től | háztól | (away) from the house |
| Elative case | from (out of) | -ból/-ből | házból | from the inside of the house |
| Sublative case | onto (movement towards a thing) | -ra/-re | házra | onto the house |
| Superessive case | on/upon (static position) | -n/-on/-en/-ön | házon | on top of the house |
| Delative case | from (movement away from a thing) | -ról/-röl | házról | from on top of the house, about the house |
| Temporal case | at (used to indicate time or moment) | -kor | kettőkor | at two (o'clock) |
| Sociative case | with (archaic) | -stul/-stül | házastul | with the house |
| Locative case | in | -ban/-ben | házban | in the house, inside the house |
| Types of | types or variants of a thing | -féle | kettőféle ház | two types of houses |
Russian
[edit]An example of a Russian case inflection is given below (with explicit stress marks), using the singular forms of the Russian term for "sailor", which belongs to Russian's first declension class.
- моря́к (nominative) "[the] sailor" [as a subject] (e.g. Там стоит моряк: The sailor is standing there)
- морякá (genitive) "[the] sailor's / [of the] sailor" (e.g. Сын моряка — художник: The sailor's son is an artist)
- моряку́ (dative) "[to/for the] sailor" [as an indirect object] (e.g. Моряку подарили подарок: (They/Someone) gave a present to the sailor)
- морякá (accusative) "[the] sailor" [as a direct object] (e.g. Вижу моряка: (I) see the sailor)
- моряко́м (instrumental) "[with/by the] sailor" (e.g. Дружу с моряком: (I) have a friendship with the sailor)
- о/на/в моряке́ (prepositional) "[about/on/in the] sailor" (e.g. Думаю о моряке: (I) think about the sailor)
Up to ten additional cases are identified by linguists, although today all of them are either incomplete (do not apply to all nouns or do not form full word paradigm with all combinations of gender and number) or degenerate (appear identical to one of the main six cases). The most recognized additional cases are locative (в лесу́, на мосту́, в слеза́х), partitive (ча́ю, са́хару, песку́), and two forms of vocative — old (Го́споди, Бо́же, о́тче) and neo-vocative (Маш, пап, ребя́т). Sometimes, so called count-form (for some countable nouns after numerals) is considered to be a sub-case.
Sanskrit
[edit]Grammatical case was analyzed extensively in Sanskrit. The grammarian Pāṇini identified six semantic roles or kāraka,[34] which are related to the following eight Sanskrit cases in order:[35]
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ¹ Vedic | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
For example, in the following sentence leaf is the agent (kartā, nominative case), tree is the source (apādāna, ablative case), and ground is the locus (adhikaraṇa, locative case). The declensions are reflected in the morphemes -āt, -am, and -au respectively.
vṛkṣ-āt
from the tree
parṇ-am
a leaf
bhūm-au
on the ground
patati
falls
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 (as subject of the verb). The declensions are reflected in the morphemes -ena and -am.
devadatt-ena
by Devadatta
odan-am
the rice
pacyate
is cooked
Tamil
[edit]The Tamil case system is analyzed in native and missionary grammars as consisting of a finite number of cases.[36][37] The usual treatment of Tamil case (Arden 1942)[38] is one in which there are seven cases: nominative (first case), accusative (second case), instrumental (third), dative (fourth), ablative (fifth), genitive (sixth), and locative (seventh). 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[37] and that Tamil usage is best understood if each suffix or combination of suffixes is seen as marking a separate case.[39]
| Case | Suffixes | Example: மன்னன் (mannan) [king] | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First case | Nominative | — |
| |
| Second case | Accusative |
|
|
|
| Third case | Instrumental |
|
|
|
| Fourth case | Dative |
|
|
|
| Fifth case | Ablative |
|
|
|
| Sixth case | Genitive |
|
|
|
| Seventh case | Locative |
|
|
|
| Eighth case | Vocative |
|
|
|
Turkish
[edit]Modern Turkish has six cases (In Turkish İsmin Hâlleri).
| Nominative What? Who? |
Accusative[c] What? Who? |
Dative[d][e][f] To whom? |
Locative[g][h] Where? Whom? |
Ablative[i][j] Where from? From whom? Why? |
Genitive Whose? What's wrong? | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Singular | çiçek / (a/the) flower (nom) | çiçeği / (a/the) flower (acc) | çiçeğe / to (a/the) flower | çiçekte / in (a/the) flower | çiçekten / from (a/the) flower | çiçeğin / of (a/the) flower |
| Plural | çiçekler / (the) flowers (nom) | çiçekleri / (the) flowers (acc) | çiçeklere / to (the) flowers | çiçeklerde / in (the) flowers | çiçeklerden / from (the) flowers | çiçeklerin / of (the) flowers |
The accusative can exist only in the noun(whether it is derived from a verb or not). For example, "Arkadaşlar bize gelmeyi düşünüyorlar." (Friends are thinking of coming to us).
The dative can exist only in the noun (whether it is derived from a verb or not). For example, "Bol bol kitap okumaya çalışıyorum." (I try to read a lot of books).[40]
Evolution
[edit]As languages evolve, case systems change. In early Ancient Greek, for example, the genitive and ablative cases of given names became combined, giving five cases, rather than the six retained in Latin. In modern Hindi, the cases have been reduced to three: a direct case (for subjects and direct objects) and oblique case, and a vocative case.[41][32] 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.[5]: 167–174 Postpositions 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 are 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 postpositions, 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.[42] 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
[edit]Morphosyntactic alignment
[edit]Languages are categorized into several case systems, based on their morphosyntactic alignment—how they group verb agents and patients into cases:
- Nominative–accusative (or simply accusative): The argument (subject) of an intransitive verb is in the same case as the agent (subject) of a transitive verb; this case is then called the nominative case, with the patient (direct object) of a transitive verb being in the accusative case.
- Ergative–absolutive (or simply ergative): The argument (subject) of an intransitive verb is in the same case as the patient (direct object) of a transitive verb; this case is then called the absolutive case, with the agent (subject) of a transitive verb being in the ergative case.
- Ergative–accusative (or tripartite): The argument (subject) of an intransitive verb is in its own case (the intransitive case), separate from that of the agent (subject) or patient (direct object) of a transitive verb (which is in the ergative case or accusative case, respectively).
- Active–stative (or simply active): The argument (subject) of an intransitive verb can be in one of two cases; if the argument is an agent, as in "He ate", then it is in the same case as the agent (subject) of a transitive verb (sometimes called the agentive case), and if it is a patient, as in "He tripped", then it is in the same case as the patient (direct object) of a transitive verb (sometimes called the patientive case).
- Trigger: One noun in a sentence is the topic or focus. This noun is in the trigger case, and information elsewhere in the sentence (for example a verb affix in Tagalog) specifies the role of the trigger. The trigger may be identified as the agent, patient, etc. Other nouns may be inflected for case, but the inflections are overloaded; for example, in Tagalog, the subject and object of a verb are both expressed in the genitive case when they are not in the trigger case.
The following are systems that some languages use to mark case instead of, or in addition to, declension:
- Positional: Nouns are not inflected for case; the position of a noun in the sentence expresses its case.
- Adpositional: Nouns are accompanied by words that mark case.
Language families
[edit]- With a few exceptions, most languages in the Finno-Ugric family make extensive use of cases. Finnish has 15 cases according to the traditional description (or up to 30 depending on the interpretation).[43] However, only 12 are commonly used in speech (see Finnish noun cases and Finnish locative system). Estonian has 14 (see Estonian locative system) and Hungarian has 18, both with additional archaic cases used for some words.
- Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages also exhibit complex case systems. Since the abovementioned languages, along with Korean and Japanese, shared certain similarities, linguists proposed an Altaic family and reconstructed its case system; although the hypothesis had been largely discredited.
- The Tsez language, a Northeast Caucasian language, has 64 cases.
- The original version of John Quijada's constructed language Ithkuil has 81 noun cases,[44] and its descendant Ilaksh and Ithkuil after the 2011 revision both have 96 noun cases.[45][46]
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.
See also
[edit]Notes
[edit]- ^ Latin cāsus used to translate Greek πτῶσις literally "falling, fall". Aristotle applied πτῶσις to any derived, inflected, or extended form of the simple ὄνομα or ῥῆμα (i.e. the nominative of nouns, the present indicative of verbs), such as the oblique cases of nouns, the variations of adjectives due to gender and comparison, also the derived adverb (e.g. δικαίως was a πτῶσις of δίκαιος ), the other tenses and moods of the verb, including its interrogative form. The grammarians, following the Stoics, restricted πτῶσις to nouns, and included the nominative under the designation.[9]
- ^ The status of the possessive as an affix or a clitic is the subject of debate.[14][15] It differs from the noun inflection of languages such as German, in that the genitive ending may attach to the last word of the phrase. To account for this, the possessive can be analysed, for instance as a clitic construction (an "enclitic postposition"[16]) or as an inflection[17][18] of the last word of a phrase ("edge inflection").[19]
- ^ Yaşamı sevmek, gazeteyi okumak, camları silmek, ödevini yapmak, sesini duymak, kapıyı açmak, üzümü toplamak. Not: Saat yediyi beş geçiyor. Üçü çeyrek geçiyor.
- ^ Saat dokuza on var. On ikiye çeyrek var. Kaç liraya? Kaça?
- ^ Edatlardan –e ile bağlananlar: bize göre, bize karşı, her şeye karşın, kışa doğru, o konuya dair, size ait, yağmura karşın, iyiliklerine karşılık
- ^ ben, senperson pronouns: Ben-e> bana, sen-e>sana
- ^ Kesir sayları kurar: Yüzde yirmi faiz, dörtte bir elma, yüzde yetmiş devam, binde bir olasılık, yüzde on beş indirim.
- ^ -de+ek-fill örneği: –Yarın evde misiniz? – Yok, okuldayım. – Şimdi neredesiniz? - Şu anda dersteyiz. Otur-mak-ta-dır (oturuyor), otur-mak-ta-y-dı (oturuyordu), otur-mak-ta-y-mış (oturuyormuş), otur-mak-ta-y-sa (oturuyorsa).
- ^ Some prepositions of name connects with –den: –den önce, - den sonra, -den dolayı, - den beri, -den itibaren, -den başka vb. kahvaltıdan önce, yemekten sonra, yağmurdan dolayı, öğleden beri, bügünden itibaren, Ayça’dan başka.
- ^ -den+ek-fill (ait olma bildirir): Kimlerdensiniz? Alp te bizdendir. (Bizim takımdandır.) Bulgaristan göçmenlerindenmiş. Sizin öğrencilerinizdenim.
References
[edit]- ^ a b Frede, Michael (1994). "The Stoic notion of a grammatical case". Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. 39: 12–24. doi:10.1111/j.2041-5370.1994.tb00449.x. JSTOR 43646836.
- ^ "Whosever". Merriam-Webster (online ed.). Archived from the original on 13 June 2021. Retrieved 22 February 2021.
Definition of 'Whosever' by Merriam-Webster.
- ^ The Chambers Dictionary (11th ed.).
- ^ Clackson 2007, p. 91.
- ^ a b c d Blake, Barry J. (2001). Case. Cambridge University Press. pp. 1, 89, 167–174.
- ^ a b "Linguaggio" [Language]. l'Enciclopedia Treccani [The Treccani Encyclopedia] (in Italian). Archived from the original on 25 September 2020. Retrieved 2 November 2018 – via treccani.it.
- ^ Michael, Ian (10 June 2010). English Grammatical Categories: And the tradition to 1800. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521143264 – via Google.
- ^ Harper, Douglas. "case". Online Etymology Dictionary.
- ^ "case". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
- ^ a b Kishor, Vraja (19 December 2016). "Whaddaya Tawki'na'bowt? Intro to Sanskrit noun use". Easy Sanskrit. Archived from the original on 7 October 2019. Retrieved 15 November 2024.
- ^ "भुज्" [to eat]. Wiktionary (in Sanskrit). Archived from the original on 11 September 2024. Retrieved 15 November 2024.
- ^ "वि-" [Vi-]. Wiktionary (in Sanskrit).
- ^ Slavic Languages on quickia.com Archived 2009-11-21 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Hudson, Richard (2013). "A cognitive analysis of John's hat". In Börjars, Kersti; Denison, David; Scott, Alan (eds.). Morphosyntactic Categories and the Expression of Possession. John Benjamins Publishing Company. pp. 123–148. ISBN 9789027273000.
- ^ Börjars, Kersti; Denison, David; Krajewski, Grzegorz; Scott, Alan (2013). "Expression of Possession in English". In Börjars, Kersti; Denison, David; Scott, Alan (eds.). Morphosyntactic Categories and the Expression of Possession. John Benjamins Publishing Company. pp. 149–176. ISBN 9789027273000.
- ^ Quirk, Randolph; Greenbaum, Sidney; Leech, Geoffrey; Svartvik, Jan (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Harlow: Longman. p. 328. ISBN 978-0-582-51734-9.
[the -s ending is] more appropriately described as an enclitic postposition'
- ^ Greenbaum, Sidney (1996). The Oxford English Grammar. Oxford University Press. pp. 109–110. ISBN 978-0-19-861250-6.
In speech the genitive is signalled in singular nouns by an inflection that has the same pronunciation variants as for plural nouns in the common case
- ^ Quirk, Randolph; Greenbaum, Sidney; Leech, Geoffrey; Svartik, Jan (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Longman. p. 319.
In writing, the inflection of regular nouns is realized in the singular by apostrophe + s (boy's), and in the regular plural by the apostrophe following the plural s (boys')
- ^ Payne, John; Huddleston, Rodney (2002). "Nouns and noun phrases". In Huddleston, Rodney; Pullum, Geoffrey (eds.). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 479–481. ISBN 978-0-521-43146-0.
We conclude that both head and phrasal genitives involve case inflection. With head genitives it is always a noun that inflects, while the phrasal genitive can apply to words of most classes.
- ^ Dionysios Thrax (1874). The grammar of Dionysios Thrax. Translated by Davidson, Tomas. St. Louis, MO: Studley. p. 10 – via Internet Archive (archive.org).
- ^ Math, Chitrapur (2002–2016). "Lesson 71 – The locative and genitive absolutes". Sati Saptami. chitrapurmath.net (online language course). Month 19 – Step by step Sanskrit learning programme. pp. 486–505 – via Internet Archive (archive.org).
- ^ Malchukov, Andrej (2010). ""Quirky" case: Rare phenomena in case-marking and their implications for a theory of typological distributions". Rethinking Universals: How rarities affect linguistic theory. pp. 139–168. doi:10.1515/9783110220933.139. ISBN 978-3-11-022092-6 – via Google.
- ^ Beetham, Frank (2007). Learning Greek with Plato. Bristol, UK: Phoenix Press.
- ^ Lipiński, Edward (1997). Semitic Languages: Outline of a comparative grammar (PDF). Peeters Publishers / Tblisi State University Department of Oriental Studies. p. 264 – via e-learning.tsu.ge.
- ^ a b Senge, Chikako (2015). A Grammar of Wanyjirra, a language of Northern Australia (Ph.D. thesis). Canberra, CT, AU: The Australian National University.
- ^ Dench, Alan; Evans, Nicholas (1 June 1988). "Multiple case-marking in Australian languages". Australian Journal of Linguistics. 8 (1): 1–47. doi:10.1080/07268608808599390. ISSN 0726-8602.
- ^ Anderson, Stephen (2005). Aspects of the Theory of Clitics. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199279906.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-927990-6. Archived from the original on 2 June 2018. Retrieved 1 July 2020.
- ^ a b Bowern, Claire (2013). A grammar of Bardi. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. ISBN 978-3-11-027818-7. OCLC 848086054.
- ^ a b Shoulson, Oliver (8 May 2019). Case suffixes as special clitics in Wangkatja (Report). Field Methods – Bowern. doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.10204.00649. Retrieved 10 September 2025 – via researchgate.net.
An analysis of case-affixes in Wangkatja (an Australian Western Desert language) as special clitics.
- ^ Wangkatja dictionary. Port Hedland, WA, AU: Wangka Maya Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre. 2008.
- ^ Corbett, Greville G.; Noonan, Michael (2008). Case and Grammatical Relations: Studies in honor of Bernard Comrie. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Jhn Benjamins Publishing Company. p. 51. ISBN 9789027290182.
- ^ a b Spencer, A. (2005). "Case in Hindi" (PDF). In Butt, Miriam; King, Tracy Holloway (eds.). Proceedings of the LFG'05 Conference, University of Bergen. Lexical Functional Grammar 2005 Conference (LFG'05). Palo Alto, CA: CSLI Publications. ISSN 1098-6782. Archived (PDF) from the original on 11 September 2024. Retrieved 10 September 2025 – via stanford.edu.
- ^ Butt, M.; King, Tracy Holloway (2004). "The Status of Case". Clause Structure in South Asian Languages. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Vol. 61. pp. 153–198. doi:10.1007/978-1-4020-2719-2_6. ISBN 978-1-4020-2717-8. S2CID 115765466.
- ^ Pieter Cornelis Verhagen, Handbook of oriental studies: India. A history of Sanskrit grammatical literature in Tibet, Volume 2, BRILL, 2001, ISBN 90-04-11882-9, p. 281.
- ^ W.D. Whitney, Sanskrit Grammar
- ^ "The Tamil Case System" (PDF). Ccat.sas.upenn.edu. Archived (PDF) from the original on 28 March 2004. Retrieved 20 November 2014.
- ^ a b K. V. Zvelebil (1972). "Dravidian Case-Suffixes: Attempt at a Reconstruction". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 92 (2): 272–276. doi:10.2307/600654. JSTOR 600654.
- ^ Arden, A.H. 1942, repr. 1969. A Progressive Grammar of the Tamil Language. Madras: Christian Literature Society.
- ^ Harold F. Schiffman (June 1998). "Standardization or restandardization: The case for "Standard" Spoken Tamil". Language in Society. 27 (3): 359–385. doi:10.1017/S0047404598003030.
- ^ 2. accusative affix -mayı 3. dative affix -maya Archived 2020-07-04 at the Wayback Machine;
- ^ McGregor, R.S. (1972). Outline of Hindi Grammar. Oxford University Press.
- ^ Remi van Trijp, "The Evolution of Case Systems for Marking Event Structure Archived 2013-06-18 at the Wayback Machine". In: Steels, Luc (Ed.), Experiments in Cultural Language Evolution, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012, p. 169-205.
- ^ "Finnish Grammar – Adverbial cases". Users.jyu.fi. Archived from the original on 11 May 2019. Retrieved 15 September 2014.
- ^ "A Philosophical Grammar of Ithkuil, a Constructed Language – Chapter 4: Case Morphology". Ithkuil.net. Archived from the original on 8 June 2009. Retrieved 15 September 2014.
- ^ "Chapter 4". Archived from the original on 12 March 2009. Retrieved 15 September 2014.
- ^ "A Grammar of the Ithkuil Language – Chapter 4: Case Morphology". Ithkuil.net. Archived from the original on 26 February 2015. Retrieved 15 September 2014.
General references
[edit]- Clackson, James (2007). Indo-European linguistics: an introduction. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781139467346.
- Ivan G. Iliev (2007) On the Nature of Grammatical Case ... (Case and Vocativeness) Archived 2016-06-25 at the Wayback Machine
External links
[edit]
- Grammatical Features Inventory – DOI: 10.15126/SMG.18/1.04
- World Atlas of Language Structures Online
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Grammatical case
View on GrokipediaFundamentals
Definition
Grammatical case is a morphological category in inflectional morphology that marks nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and numerals to indicate their grammatical roles within a sentence, such as subject, direct object, indirect object, or possessor. This marking typically involves alterations in word form, such as suffixes, to signal syntactic relationships between constituents.[5] A key distinction exists between morphological case, which refers to the overt formal changes in word structure, and semantic or syntactic case, which denotes the underlying functional or interpretive roles independent of surface realization. Morphological case is language-specific and realized through affixes or adpositions, whereas semantic case captures universal notions like agency or patienthood that influence meaning and syntax. This separation allows for analysis of how deep-structure relations map onto surface forms across languages.[5][9] As part of inflectional morphology, case systems contrast with other morphological types: in fusional languages, case markers often fuse with indicators of number, gender, or other categories into a single portmanteau morpheme, while in agglutinative systems, case is expressed through sequential, separable affixes that retain clear boundaries. Case typology further includes alignments such as nominative-accusative, where the subject of both transitive and intransitive verbs receives nominative marking while the transitive object takes accusative, versus ergative-absolutive, where the intransitive subject and transitive object share absolutive marking, with the transitive subject marked ergative. These alignments highlight how case encodes core grammatical relations differently across language families.[10][11]Core Functions
Grammatical cases fulfill essential syntactic functions by identifying the roles of noun phrases within a clause, particularly in marking core arguments and oblique relations. The nominative case typically designates the subject, the entity performing the action or serving as the topic of the predicate.[6] The accusative case marks the direct object, the entity directly affected by the verb's action.[12] For oblique relations, the dative case indicates the indirect object, often the recipient or beneficiary of the action.[13] Similarly, the genitive case expresses possession or association between nouns, linking one entity as dependent on another.[14] Beyond syntax, cases encode semantic functions that specify spatial, temporal, or manner-related interpretations. The locative case denotes static location, indicating where an event occurs or a state holds.[15] The instrumental case signals the means or instrument by which an action is accomplished, often implying accompaniment or method.[16] The ablative case conveys source, separation, or removal, marking origin or departure from a point.[17] Cases play a crucial role in clarifying verb valence and argument structure, especially in languages with flexible word order, by disambiguating whether a verb is transitive or intransitive through distinct markings on participants.[18] This ensures that the semantic roles of agent, patient, and beneficiary are unambiguously assigned, preventing confusion in clause interpretation. In languages with reduced or vestigial case systems, such as English, prepositions and postpositions frequently assume the marking of oblique and semantic relations that full case systems handle morphologically, allowing word order to bear more functional load.[19] Case hierarchies, such as the nominative-accusative alignment, can influence default assignments in mixed systems.[20]Historical Origins
Etymology
The term "grammatical case" originates from the Latin casus, meaning "falling" or "accident," derived from the verb cadere ("to fall"), which metaphorically described nouns deviating or "falling away" from their base forms during declension.[21] This terminology directly translates the Ancient Greek ptōsis, also signifying "falling" or "inclination," used to denote the oblique forms of nouns in inflectional paradigms.[21] The Greek concept of ptōsis was formalized in the 2nd century BCE by Dionysius Thrax in his Tékhnē grammatikḗ, the earliest surviving systematic grammar of Greek, where it encompassed the nominative and oblique cases as variations in noun inflection.[22] Dionysius's work, influenced by Stoic philosophy, established ptōsis as a core category for morphological analysis, distinguishing upright (orthḗ) and fallen (ptōsis) forms. In the Roman era, Latin grammarians adopted casus as the equivalent, with Aelius Donatus in the 4th century CE and Priscian in the 6th century CE embedding it deeply in educational texts like Donatus's Ars minor and Priscian's Institutiones grammaticae.[23] These works, which treated casus as one of the "accidents" of nouns (alongside gender, number, and quality), became foundational for medieval European scholarship, ensuring the term's widespread use in vernacular grammars across the continent.[24] By the 19th and 20th centuries, as comparative linguistics expanded to non-Indo-European languages, the term "case" evolved to specifically denote inflectional marking on nouns, distinguishing it from postpositions or adpositions—free-standing relational words—in agglutinative or isolating languages where fusion is absent.[25] This terminological refinement, emphasized in modern syntactic theories, underscores case as a morphological category tied to noun inflection rather than syntactic adjuncts.[20]Development in Proto-Indo-European
The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language is reconstructed as having an eight-case system for nominal declension, comprising the nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, locative, instrumental, and vocative cases.[1][26] These cases served distinct grammatical and semantic functions, such as marking subjects (nominative), direct objects (accusative), possession (genitive), indirect objects (dative), separation or source (ablative), location (locative), means or accompaniment (instrumental), and direct address (vocative).[27] The reconstruction relies on the comparative method, analyzing shared morphological patterns across daughter languages while accounting for sound changes.[28] Evidence for this system comes primarily from Indo-Iranian languages like Vedic Sanskrit, which preserves all eight cases with minimal alteration, providing the clearest attestation of PIE endings such as the nominative singular *-s for animates and the instrumental plural *-bʰis.[27] In contrast, Anatolian languages like Hittite exhibit mergers and innovations, such as the syncretism of dative and locative into a single form, alongside retention of an ablative and the development of an allative case from PIE adverbial elements, indicating early divergence and partial preservation.[29] These variations highlight how PIE's case distinctions influenced descendant languages, with conservative branches like Indo-Iranian offering robust paradigms and more innovative ones like Anatolian showing functional realignments.[30] Case marking in PIE was closely tied to animacy and gender, with nouns distinguished as animate (later developing into masculine and feminine) or inanimate (neuter). Animate nouns typically showed overt distinctions in core cases, such as separate nominative (-s) and accusative (-m) singular endings, reflecting their higher discourse salience as agents or patients, while inanimate nouns often lacked such differentiation, using identical forms for nominative and accusative to indicate topics or non-prominent objects.[31] This animacy-based system predated the three-gender PIE framework, where gender agreement in case endings reinforced these patterns across adjectives and nouns.[28] Phonological developments in PIE and its early branches led to case mergers, particularly syncretism between ablative and locative forms in some lineages, driven by the erosion of vowel contrasts and loss of final consonants. For instance, the PIE ablaut variations (e.g., *o-grade in locative *-oi vs. *e-grade in ablative *-eod) facilitated mergers in Anatolian and later in Italic and Germanic, where sound shifts like the reduction of short vowels blurred distinctions, resulting in combined "oblique" cases that subsumed multiple spatial functions.[32] These changes underscore the system's evolution from a highly differentiated PIE stage to reduced inventories in daughter languages, preserving core oppositions like nominative-accusative while sacrificing peripheral ones.[33]Structural Features
Hierarchy of Cases
In grammatical case systems, hierarchies establish priorities among cases based on their structural roles, markedness, and interaction with other syntactic features, influencing how languages encode relationships between nouns and predicates. These hierarchies reflect universal tendencies observed across languages, where more central or unmarked cases appear higher, guiding phenomena like case assignment, syncretism, and relativization. One fundamental distinction is the core-oblique hierarchy, which separates primary cases marking core arguments (such as subjects and direct objects) from secondary oblique cases encoding peripheral relations.[34][35] The core-oblique hierarchy posits nominative (or ergative/absolutive in ergative languages) and accusative as core cases, essential for identifying the main participants in a clause, while genitive and dative function as obliques for possession, location, or indirect objects. This division underscores that core cases are more frequent, less marked morphologically, and privileged in syntactic operations, as they directly link to verbal arguments without additional adpositions in many languages. Oblique cases, by contrast, often encode adjunct-like roles and exhibit greater syncretism or omission in reduced constructions. Empirical studies confirm this hierarchy's role in predicting case inventory sizes and marking patterns, with core cases universally present in nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive systems.[36][37] Complementing structural hierarchies, the animacy hierarchy intersects with case marking, particularly in differential object marking (DOM), where objects higher in animacy—such as humans over animals or inanimates—receive overt case marking to resolve ambiguity or highlight prominence. This scale, often ordered as 1st person > 2nd person > 3rd person proper (humans) > 3rd person common (animals/inanimates) > inanimates, promotes iconicity by aligning more topical, sentient entities with explicit encoding, as seen in languages like Spanish or Hindi where animate direct objects take accusative markers while inanimates do not. Theoretical accounts frame this as a harmony between animacy prominence and grammatical function, where higher-animacy objects behave like more oblique or marked forms to avoid default interpretations. Cross-linguistic surveys demonstrate that animacy consistently drives DOM.[38][39] In relative clause formation, the accessibility hierarchy governs case retention and relativization strategies, ranking positions as subject > direct object > indirect object > oblique > genitive > object of comparison. Higher positions on this scale facilitate easier extraction or gapping without resumptive pronouns, and case marking is more likely preserved for lower positions to maintain clarity. This implicational universal, derived from analyses of 50+ languages, predicts that if a language relativizes obliques, it also does so for subjects and objects, with case retention decreasing down the hierarchy to avoid overload on the head noun. Theoretical models synthesize these patterns into comprehensive case hierarchies, with Barry Blake's proposed order—nominative > accusative (or ergative) > genitive > dative > ablative > locative > instrumental/comitative—capturing markedness implications for case systems worldwide. According to this model, languages acquire cases sequentially from the top, such that a system with dative will typically include nominative, accusative, and genitive; exceptions are rare and often involve areal influences. Blake's hierarchy, inspired by adverbial ordering in syntax, holds as a strong tendency across Indo-European, Uralic, and Australian languages, validated by typological databases, though it allows flexibility for ergative alignments.[36][37]Case Ordering and Sequencing
In Indo-European languages, the standard sequence of grammatical cases in declension paradigms is nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, locative, instrumental, and vocative.[40] This order reflects a traditional arrangement adapted from ancient Sanskrit grammatical traditions for pedagogical purposes in languages like Latin and Greek. In Sanskrit, cases are numbered by vibhakti as prathamā (1st, nominative), dvitiyā (2nd, accusative), tṛtīyā (3rd, instrumental), caturthī (4th, dative), pañcamī (5th, ablative), ṣaṣṭhī (6th, genitive), saptamī (7th, locative), and sambodhana (8th, vocative), which influenced subsequent descriptions of Proto-Indo-European and its descendants but was rearranged in many descendant grammars to group core cases before obliques.[41] Historical grammars of languages like Latin and Greek adapted this framework, often adjusting vocative placement for pedagogical clarity while preserving the core relational progression from subject to oblique functions.[4] Non-Indo-European languages exhibit diverse case orderings tailored to their morphosyntactic alignments and agglutinative structures. In many Australian languages, which predominantly feature ergative-absolutive systems, paradigms typically sequence the unmarked absolutive case first, followed by the ergative marker for transitive agents, with spatial cases like locative or ablative appended thereafter to emphasize core argument roles before peripheral ones.[42] Agglutinative systems, such as those in Turkish or Finnish, often position possessive markers before case suffixes in the linear affix order, resulting in a sequencing where relational possession (e.g., genitive-like) precedes locative or directional cases, ensuring cumulative expression of ownership prior to spatial relations.[43] Several factors shape these case orderings beyond mere convention. Semantic proximity frequently guides sequencing, grouping cases with interconnected meanings—such as locative (indicating static position, akin to "in") before ablative (indicating motion away, akin to "from")—to mirror conceptual hierarchies in spatial and relational logic.[44] Phonological ease also influences organization, as paradigms are structured to cluster inflections with similar vowel or consonant patterns, reducing perceptual ambiguity and facilitating morphological transparency in suffixation.[45] This systematic ordering plays a crucial role in paradigm organization, enabling learners to internalize declensions through predictable patterns that highlight functional contrasts and inflectional regularities. In historical grammars, adherence to such sequences supports comparative analysis across languages, preserving diachronic insights into case evolution while aiding pedagogical efficiency in teaching complex systems.[46] Case hierarchies, in turn, may inform default orders by prioritizing unmarked or core cases at the paradigm's outset.[47]Case Concord and Agreement
Case concord refers to the morphological agreement in grammatical case between a head noun and its dependents, such as adjectives, determiners, and modifiers, within a noun phrase, ensuring syntactic cohesion and functional clarity.[48] In languages with robust case systems, this agreement propagates the case assigned to the head noun to attributive elements, marking their shared role in the sentence.[49] Full concord occurs when all relevant dependents fully match the head noun's case, as seen in fusional languages like German, where adjectives inflect for the case, gender, and number of the noun they modify—for instance, the adjective ending changes to reflect dative case in phrases like dem großen Haus ("to the big house"). Partial concord, by contrast, involves incomplete matching, where only certain features or elements agree, often in languages with weakening case systems or mixed morphology.[50] This distinction highlights varying degrees of inflectional dependency across languages, with full concord reinforcing strict hierarchical relations in the noun phrase.[48] The primary trigger for case agreement is the head noun's syntactic position and assigned case, which influences dependents in attributive roles through feature percolation or checking mechanisms, ensuring that modifiers align with the phrase's overall grammatical function.[51] Exceptions arise with fixed-case elements, such as invariant articles or postpositions that do not inflect regardless of the head noun's case, as observed in certain mixed systems where historical remnants preserve non-agreeing forms.[50] Partial agreement can also occur in contact-induced varieties or dialects, where full concord erodes, leading to default or invariant markings on some dependents. Theoretically, case concord underscores case as an interpretable feature in minimalist syntax, driving agreement operations that build phrase structure by valuing uninterpretable case features on dependents against the head noun's valued feature, thus facilitating efficient derivation at the interfaces.[52] This feature-based approach explains concord as a local relation within the noun phrase, contributing to broader principles of economy and legibility in syntactic theory.[48] Hierarchies of cases may influence default agreement patterns in ambiguous contexts, prioritizing structural prominence.[49]Grammatical Patterns
Declension Paradigms
Declension paradigms refer to the systematic patterns of inflectional endings and stem modifications that nouns, pronouns, and adjectives undergo to indicate grammatical case, number, and gender across languages. These paradigms organize lexical items into classes based on shared morphological behaviors, allowing predictable marking of syntactic roles such as subject, object, or possessor. In many languages, paradigms are structured hierarchically, with core cases like nominative and accusative forming the foundation, extended by oblique cases for locative or instrumental functions. Fusional paradigms, common in Indo-European languages, combine multiple grammatical categories into single affixes or involve stem alternations, distinguishing between strong and weak declensions. Strong declensions typically apply to vowel-final stems (e.g., a-stems or o-stems in Proto-Indo-European), where endings like *-os for o-stem nominative singular or *-ōms for o-stem accusative plural fuse case and number information without additional stem changes. In contrast, weak declensions handle consonant-final or n-stems, often featuring simpler endings but requiring umlaut or ablaut shifts, such as vowel gradation in Germanic languages to signal case distinctions. These patterns ensure that fusional elements encode case oppositions efficiently within a compact morphology. Number and gender interactions within declension paradigms further modulate case forms, creating distinct singular and plural variants across masculine, feminine, and neuter classes. For instance, in masculine nouns, nominative singular might end in -s while plural shifts to -es, whereas neuter paradigms often neutralize nominative and accusative in both numbers, using *-om endings for singular and *-eh₂ for plural in PIE to reflect semantic unity in inanimate referents. Feminine paradigms may employ *-eh₂ in singular nominative but diverge in dative with *-eh₂ei, highlighting how gender influences case accessibility and animacy hierarchies. These interactions maintain paradigmatic coherence, where plural forms amplify case contrasts to accommodate collective meanings. Irregular paradigms deviate from standard patterns through suppletive forms, where unrelated stems replace expected inflections, often preserving archaic or high-frequency elements. In English, pronouns exemplify this: the first-person singular uses "I" for nominative but "me" for accusative, while third-person maintains "he" versus "him," reflecting historical Indo-European roots rather than productive rules. Such suppletions prioritize functional clarity in core vocabulary, resisting regularization seen in regular nouns. Cross-linguistically, declension paradigms vary between fusional blending and agglutinative suffixation, adapting to typological profiles. In Latin, fusional endings like -um for genitive singular merge case, number, and gender into inseparable units, promoting compact expressions. Turkish, by contrast, employs agglutinative suffixes such as -in for genitive or -de for locative, appended sequentially to stems without fusion, enabling transparent stacking of categories. These generalizations underscore how paradigms balance expressiveness with morphological economy across language families. Case concord briefly applies to these paradigms by aligning adjective endings with noun inflections for agreement.Syncretism and Neutralization
Syncretism in grammatical case systems occurs when two or more distinct case functions are realized by a single morphological form, thereby reducing the number of unique inflections within a paradigm. This phenomenon is widespread across languages and can manifest in various types, including mergers between core cases such as nominative and accusative, often observed in inanimate or neuter nouns. For instance, in many Indo-European languages like German and Russian, the nominative and accusative cases syncretize for neuter singular nouns, where the same form serves both subject and object roles.[53] Syncretism can also extend across non-core cases, such as the dative-ablative merger in ancient Indo-European languages, or involve combinations like genitive-locative in Uralic languages. Additionally, it frequently interacts with other grammatical categories, leading to mergers across numbers (e.g., identical forms for singular and plural in certain cases) or genders (e.g., masculine and feminine sharing accusative forms in some Slavic languages). These patterns are documented in cross-linguistic surveys, where mergers of core argument cases are common, occurring in about 55% of case-marking languages (40 out of 73 in WALS data), while extended types involving oblique cases are also prevalent.[53] Neutralization patterns represent a context-dependent form of syncretism, where case distinctions collapse under specific syntactic or semantic conditions, further simplifying morphology. A common example is the genitive-accusative neutralization for animate nouns in the plural, as seen in Russian, where the form studentov (students) serves both genitive (possession) and accusative (direct object) functions without additional marking.[54] This type of merger often aligns with animacy hierarchies, collapsing distinctions for animate referents in genitive-accusative while inanimates merge accusative with nominative, thereby optimizing morphological economy without fully eliminating case contrasts. In markedness theory, such neutralizations highlight asymmetries, where unmarked categories (e.g., inanimates) exhibit greater syncretism than marked ones (e.g., animates). Cross-linguistically, these patterns challenge universal markedness hierarchies by showing that communicative biases favor mergers in less salient contexts.[32][55] Diachronically, case syncretism often arises from phonological erosion, which erodes distinctions between originally separate case endings and leads to homonymy. In the Romance languages, for example, the Vulgar Latin loss of final consonants (e.g., the -m of accusative *-ōs) and reduction in vowel quantity caused widespread mergers, such as the accusative-ablative syncretism that became the default oblique case in languages like French and Spanish. This process was accelerated by analogy across declension classes, spreading identical forms throughout the system. Similar erosive changes are attested in other families, where sound shifts homogenize endings, as in the Germanic languages' reduction from multiple cases to primarily nominative-accusative distinctions.[56] The functional consequences of syncretism include a shift toward alternative strategies for encoding grammatical relations, such as increased reliance on fixed word order and adpositions. In languages like Modern English, extensive case mergers from Old English prompted the rigidification of subject-verb-object order to disambiguate roles previously marked by case, while prepositions like to and of assumed functions of dative and genitive. This compensatory mechanism preserves semantic clarity despite morphological simplification, though it can introduce ambiguities resolvable only by context. In ongoing systems like those in Baltic languages, partial syncretism has led to preposition proliferation for oblique cases, reducing the cognitive load of memorizing distinct forms.[57]Language-Specific Illustrations
Indo-European Languages
Indo-European languages exhibit case systems that largely derive from the eight-case structure reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European (PIE), with variations arising through historical mergers, losses, and innovations across branches.[58] While some languages like Sanskrit retain the full set, others such as Latin and Russian show partial preservation, and Germanic languages like German and English display significant reduction, reflecting divergent evolutionary paths within the family.[58] Latin employs six cases—nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, and vocative—across singular and plural numbers, marking syntactic roles such as subject, possession, indirect object, direct object, separation, and address.[4] This system inherits core functions from PIE but merges the instrumental and locative into the ablative, reducing the original eight to six.[58] A representative paradigm is that of servus (slave), a second-declension masculine noun, which illustrates typical endings for indicating case and number:| Case | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| Nominative | servus | servi |
| Genitive | servi | servōrum |
| Dative | servō | servīs |
| Accusative | servum | servōs |
| Ablative | servō | servīs |
| Vocative | serve | servī |
Non-Indo-European Languages
Basque, a language isolate spoken in the western Pyrenees, exhibits an ergative-absolutive alignment in its core case system, where the absolutive marks both the intransitive subject and the transitive object (unmarked form), while the ergative suffix -k indicates the transitive subject, and the dative -i marks indirect objects. Beyond these three primary grammatical cases, Basque employs case suffixes to express a wide array of spatial and semantic relations, such as locative (gainduan, "in the forest"), allative (etxe-ra, "to the house"), and ablative (menditik, "from the mountain"), yielding more than 12 distinct case functions in total. This system combines suffixal marking for core arguments with additional case suffixes and postpositional phrases for peripheral roles, allowing flexible noun phrase constructions without strict word order dependencies.[66] In the Uralic family, Hungarian demonstrates one of the most elaborate case systems, featuring 18 cases expressed through agglutinative suffixes that attach sequentially to noun stems to indicate grammatical relations, location, and other functions.[67] Core cases include the nominative (unmarked, e.g., ház "house"), accusative (ház-at "house-ACC"), and dative (ház-nak "house-DAT"), while spatial cases like the inessive -ban (ház-ban "in the house") and superessive -n (asztal-on "on the table") highlight the language's capacity for precise locational encoding via vowel harmony and stem alternations.[67] This agglutinative morphology enables complex derivations in a single word, such as iskolá-ba-nk-entől (school-ILL-1PL.POSS-ABL, "from our school"), stacking cases to convey nuanced spatial or relational meanings without additional words.[68] Turkish, classified within the Turkic branch of the Altaic hypothesis, utilizes six primary cases marked by suffixes that adhere to strict vowel harmony rules, ensuring phonological compatibility between stem vowels and case endings.[69] The nominative is unmarked (e.g., ev "house"), genitive uses -in (evin "of the house"), dative -e (eve "to the house"), accusative -i (evi "the house-ACC"), locative -de (evde "in/at the house"), and ablative -den (evden "from the house"), with forms adjusting for front/back and rounded/unrounded vowels (e.g., kitap-ta vs. el-de).[70] This system supports agglutinative verb-noun constructions, where case suffixes directly attach to roots, facilitating compact expressions of possession, direction, and location in subject-object-verb order.[71] Among Dravidian languages, Tamil employs eight cases in an agglutinative framework, where suffixes fuse to noun roots to denote syntactic and semantic roles, often without gender or number agreement in basic forms.[72] The nominative is unmarked (viṭu "house"), accusative uses -ai (viṭṭ-ai "house-ACC"), dative -ku (viṭu-kku "to the house"), genitive -uṭaiya (viṭu-uṭaiya "of the house"), sociative -ōṭu (nāṉ-ōṭu "with me"), and locative -iṉ (viṭu-iṉ "in the house"), with additional instrumental -āl and ablative -iṉṟu completing the set.[73] This structure allows for stacked affixes in longer words, such as pāṭṭi-k-kaḷ-uṭaiya (grandmother-PL-GEN, "of the grandmothers"), emphasizing relational hierarchies in sentence building.[72] Australian Aboriginal languages like Dyirbal, from the Pama-Nyungan family, feature an ergative-absolutive case system with split-ergativity, where pronouns often follow nominative-accusative patterns while nouns adhere to ergative marking.[74] Core cases include the absolutive (unmarked for S and O, e.g., balan "man-ABS"), ergative -ŋgu (balan-ŋgu "man-ERG"), and dative -na (yara-na "man-DAT"), alongside nine total cases encompassing instrumental -ŋu (ŋayu-ŋu "I-INS"), locative -bila (dama-bila "rain-LOC"), genitive -ɽiŋ (babi-ɽiŋ "father-GEN"), and allative -gu (wawal-gu "stone-ALL"). The split system reflects discourse-based sensitivities, with ergative marking prominent in transitive clauses but neutralized in certain contexts like antipassives, contributing to the language's syntactic flexibility.[75]Typological Perspectives
Morphosyntactic Alignment
Morphosyntactic alignment refers to the way in which grammatical cases or agreement markers pattern the core arguments of verbs—specifically, the subject of an intransitive verb (S), the subject (agent) of a transitive verb (A), and the object (patient) of a transitive verb (P)—across different clause types.[76] This alignment determines how these arguments are treated similarly or differently in terms of case marking and verb agreement, reflecting underlying syntactic and semantic relationships in a language's grammar.[77] In nominative-accusative alignment, the most common type cross-linguistically, the S and A arguments are treated alike, typically marked by the nominative case or by agreement on the verb, while the P is distinguished, often by the accusative case.[77] This pattern groups the more agent-like arguments together, facilitating unified syntactic roles such as subjecthood in many Indo-European languages, where, for example, Latin and Greek exhibit nominative marking for both intransitive subjects and transitive agents.[77] Ergative-absolutive alignment, in contrast, treats the S and P arguments as a unified set, marked by the absolutive case (often unmarked), while the A receives a distinct ergative marker. This system highlights the patient-like role shared by S and P, as seen in languages like Basque, where intransitive subjects and transitive objects take no special marking, but transitive agents are suffixed with -k (e.g., gizona etorri da 'the man came' vs. gizonak liburua irakurri du 'the man read the book'). Australian languages such as Dyirbal similarly employ this alignment, with absolutive for S/P and ergative for A, emphasizing semantic transitivity over agent prominence. Split-ergativity occurs when a language employs more than one alignment pattern, often conditioned by factors like tense-aspect, animacy, or person hierarchy.[76] In Hindi-Urdu, for instance, an aspect-based split is evident: transitive agents in perfective clauses take ergative marking (-ne), aligning ergative-absolutive (e.g., ram-ne kitaab padh-ii 'Ram read the book'), while imperfective clauses use nominative-accusative alignment with direct case on the agent (e.g., ram kitaab padh-taa hai 'Ram reads the book'). This switch reflects a historical shift from an earlier accusative system, where perfective aspects prioritize semantic agentivity. Active-stative alignment, also known as split-S or semantic alignment, patterns S arguments based on the verb's semantics rather than a uniform syntactic category: agentive or active intransitive subjects (Sa) are marked like transitive agents (often with an agentive case), while patientive or stative intransitive subjects (Sp) align with transitive patients (e.g., absolutive). This type emphasizes the inherent role properties of the single argument, as in Georgian, where active verbs like 'run' take nominative Sa but stative verbs like 'lie' take dative Sp, or in Native American languages such as Lakota, where verb agreement cross-references Sa with active affixes and Sp with inactive ones. Such systems prioritize lexical and semantic distinctions over strict syntactic parallelism.[78]Distribution Across Language Families
Grammatical case systems exhibit considerable variation in their prevalence and complexity across the world's language families, with morphological case marking appearing in a minority of languages overall. In a typological sample of 261 languages documented in the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS), 100 languages (approximately 38%) lack any morphological case on nouns, instead encoding grammatical relations through word order, adpositions, or clitics.[79] Among those with case marking, the number ranges from 2 to over 10, but such systems are geographically concentrated, predominantly in Eurasian families, while being rarer in Africa, the Americas, and Oceania.[79] This distribution reflects broader typological patterns, including a higher incidence of nominative-accusative alignment in case-heavy families like Indo-European, contrasted with ergative-absolutive systems elsewhere. Within the Indo-European family, case systems were historically robust but have largely eroded in many branches. Proto-Indo-European is reconstructed with eight nominal cases, including nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, locative, instrumental, and vocative.[80] Modern descendants show reduction: Slavic languages retain 6–7 cases, Germanic typically 4, while Romance languages like French and Spanish have eliminated morphological case on nouns, relying on prepositions and fixed word order for about 2–4 functional distinctions in pronouns.[81] Uralic languages feature some of the richest case systems globally, characterized by agglutinative morphology with numerous suffixes marking spatial, modal, and relational functions. Finnish exemplifies this with 15 cases, including essive, inessive, elative, illative, adessive, ablative, allative, and abessive, among others.[82] Similarly, Altaic languages (noting ongoing debate on their genetic unity) display extensive case inventories, such as Turkish with 6–7 cases and Mongolian with up to 9, often agglutinative and incorporating locative and directional distinctions.[82] Austronesian languages rarely employ morphological case, favoring prepositional or particle-based marking for grammatical roles, with Proto-Austronesian reconstructed to have had four sets of clitic case markers (nominative, genitive, oblique, locative) applied differently to proper names and common nouns.[83] Exceptions occur in Formosan languages of Taiwan, such as Amis, which exhibit limited morphological case alongside voice systems, including nominative and genitive markers on nouns.[84] Sino-Tibetan languages generally feature minimal morphological case, often relying on classifiers, word order, and postpositions rather than inflection. Tibetan stands out with four primary cases—absolutive (unmarked), agentive/ergative, genitive, and oblique—supplemented by postpositions for additional relations like ablative and locative.[85] In Amerindian and Papuan language families, case systems often emphasize ergative alignment, with split-ergativity common due to factors like tense-aspect or animacy. Many Amerindian languages, such as those in the Mayan and Algonquian families, use ergative-absolutive marking for core arguments, sometimes with 2–4 cases split by hierarchy.[86] Papuan languages similarly show ergative dominance, as in Fore, where an ergative case marker distinguishes transitive subjects from absolutive objects and intransitive subjects, often in split systems conditioned by verb type.[87]Evolutionary Dynamics
From Ancient to Modern Forms
In ancient Indo-European languages, case systems were highly developed and inflectional, reflecting a rich morphological structure inherited from earlier stages. Vedic Sanskrit, the oldest attested form of Indo-Aryan, featured a full set of eight cases—nominative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive, locative, and vocative—used to mark syntactic roles through suffixation on noun stems.[88] Similarly, Classical Greek employed five primary cases—nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative—to indicate grammatical functions, with declensions varying by gender, number, and stem type.[89] These systems allowed for flexible word order while preserving semantic clarity via morphological markers. During the medieval period, significant diachronic shifts occurred in some Indo-European branches, particularly in the transition from synthetic to analytic structures. In the Romance languages, the robust six-case system of Classical Latin eroded progressively, leading to its near-complete loss in modern descendants like French by the 12th century; this change was driven by phonological reductions that neutralized distinctions and the rise of prepositional phrases as analytic alternatives for expressing case relations.[90] For instance, Latin's ablative and dative functions were increasingly replaced by prepositions such as de and à, fixing subject-verb-object order and reducing reliance on inflection.[90] The 19th and 20th centuries saw documentation and revitalization efforts that influenced case systems in peripheral Indo-European languages. In Irish Gaelic, a Celtic language with a historically complex case inventory reduced to four cases—nominative, vocative, genitive, and dative—by the modern era, revival movements like the Gaelic League (founded 1893) aimed to standardize and preserve grammatical features amid language shift, incorporating case usage in educational materials and literature to counter anglicization.[91] In Slavic languages, Polish retained a seven-case system (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, vocative) while Russian maintained six cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, prepositional); 19th-century philological reforms and 20th-century national codifications under figures like Jan Baudouin de Courtenay formalized declension paradigms, ensuring consistency across dialects during state-building.[92][93] Contact with non-Indo-European languages also shaped case evolution in specific branches. Armenian, with its seven-case system, experienced Iranian (including Persian) influence primarily through lexical borrowing and syntactic calques during the Parthian and Sassanid periods, though core case morphology remained intact; for example, certain genitive constructions in Middle Armenian reflect adaptations from Middle Persian patterns without altering the inflectional framework.[94] Research on substrate effects during Indo-European expansions has highlighted how pre-existing non-Indo-European languages influenced case retention or simplification. Studies integrating ancient DNA and linguistic reconstruction suggest that substrates in regions like the Caucasus and Anatolia contributed to variations in case marking during Bronze Age migrations.Loss and Innovation in Case Systems
In languages undergoing case reduction, one primary mechanism involves the grammaticalization of prepositions, which progressively assume the semantic and syntactic roles previously fulfilled by inflectional case markers. This process often leads to the erosion of synthetic morphology in favor of analytic constructions, as seen in the historical development of English, where the genitive case—originally expressed through suffixes like those in Old English cyninges ("of the king")—has been supplanted by prepositional phrases with "of," as in modern "the kingdom of the king."[95] Such shifts reflect broader typological changes, where adpositions evolve from lexical items to functional elements encoding relational meanings, thereby compensating for the loss of nominal inflections.[96] Retention of case systems in the face of colloquial simplification is frequently bolstered by literary and educational standards, which enforce prescriptive norms in formal contexts. In German, the standard variety preserves a four-case system (nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive) through codified grammar in literature, schooling, and media, despite non-standard dialects showing significant case syncretism or omission, such as the defunct genitive in Bavarian varieties.[97] Similarly, Russian maintains its six-case paradigm in written and official registers, where deviations in spoken dialects— like reduced dative usage in casual speech—are overridden by the prestige of literary Russian, ensuring systemic consistency among educated speakers.[98] Innovations in case marking appear in contact varieties, including creoles and endangered languages, where new affixes or particles emerge to signal grammatical relations. In creole languages, such neo-cases often arise through reanalysis of substrate and superstrate elements; for instance, Yilan Creole (a Japanese-based creole) employs particles like ni (nominative) and de (dative), derived from Japanese but repurposed as case markers in novel syntactic patterns.[99] Among endangered language varieties influenced by contact, split-ergativity can develop as an innovative alignment. Current trends in linguistics include computational modeling to simulate case evolution, providing insights into mechanisms of loss and innovation. Agent-based models demonstrate that case systems can emerge and stabilize through iterative communication pressures, where markers reduce listener ambiguity and cognitive load, as shown in simulations of cultural transmission yielding structured case paradigms from initially unstructured inputs.[100] These models predict pathways for retention or innovation under varying contact scenarios, informing reconstructions of endangered systems. In pidgins and creoles, emergent case systems frequently blend substrate case features with lexifier adpositions, creating hybrid morphologies. For example, in Atlantic creoles like Saramaccan, case-like distinctions for agentivity and location draw from Gbe substrate languages, regrammaticalized via particles that encode roles absent in the English lexifier, thus illustrating substrate-driven innovation in core argument marking.[101]References
- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%81%D1%82%D1%83%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%82
- https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Sanskrit_Grammar_%28Whitney%29/Chapter_IV