3. Grammatical category of case

Definition of case

The notion of case goes back to Ancient Greece. However, they understood it differently. Aristotle defined cases as deviation from names and verbs due to the logically dependent position in the sentence, i.e. according to Aristotle, both nouns and verbs had cases. The Stoics restricted the use of the term 'case' to noun paradigm. They were the first who call them Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Vocative and Instrumental. Nowadays case is usually regarded as morphological form of a declinable form used to express a certain meaning or to denote a certain relation to other words (C.T. Onions). Professor Ilyish gives another definition: case is the category of the noun expressing relations between the things denoting by the noun and another thing, proper or action. This definition does not stand criticism. Being a linguistic notion case can't connect objects of extra-linguistic reality.

Number of cases

Linguists are still at variance as to the number of cases in modern English. Representatives of universal grammar speak of six cases, i.e. they apply the Latin system to the English language, but English has its own peculiarities which should not be disregarded,

E.g. as opposed to inflected Latin, modern English is an analytical language.

Nesfield mentions five cases: Nominative, Vocative, Accusative, Genitive and Dative, remarking at the same time that the Genitive is the only case that is now indicated by change of form. The other cases have lost their case endings and are indicated only by grammatical relation.

When a noun is used as the subject, it is said to be in the Nominative case,

E.g. My friend is a bright student.

When a noun is used for the sake of address, it is said to be in the Vocative case,

E.g. Are you coming, my friend?

When a noun is a direct object, it is said to be in the Accusative case,

E.g. I saw my friend in the street.

When a noun is an indirect object, it is said to be in the Dative case,

E.g. I gave my friend an apple.

If we stick to the definition of case as a morphological category, we'll have to admit that neither Nominative, nor Vocative, nor Accusative, nor Dative exist in modern English because there are no formal distinctions between them.

Curme singles out four cases in Modern English: Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accusative. These cases did exist in Old English, but in the course of time the originally Nominative, Dative, Accusative coincided in one form which is opposed nowadays to the inflected Genitive. But Curme thinks that the relations which were earlier expressed with the help of special case inflections are now indicated by word-order and prepositional combinations.

However, case is a morphological category and word-order is a syntactic factor as for the theory of the so-called analytical cases that consist of a preposition and a noun, it is not convincing either.

Khaimovich and Rogovskaya deny the existence of the following grounds:

1) Prepositions are not devoid of lexical meaning; consequently they can't be regarded as the first components of analytical forms;

2) Every grammatical category should comprise a limited number of members. If we referred prepositional combinations to case forms, the number of cases would grow immensely and we would be creating the illusion of classification;

3) Analytical forms are generally singled out as opposed to synthetic forms. With prepositional construction it's different. They are often synonymous with the so-called synthetic cases,

E.g. the house of your neighbour = your neighbour's house

There is much subjectivity in the choice of prepositions.

Bryant and Whitehall find three cases in Modern English. On the analogy of case forms of personal pronounce: Nominative, Genitive and Objective.

	Nominative	Genitive	Objective
Pronouns	he	his	him
Noun	man	man’s	man

Criticizing this point of view professor Smirnitsky prescribes forth the following argument:

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1) Nouns and personal pronouns belong to different parts of speech;

2) The crew of the personal pronouns is rather small. That's why it is doubtful that the case system of personal pronouns could influence the case system of nouns.

What is more, nouns lack special inflection for the nominative and the objective cases.

The majority of linguists recognize the existence of two cases in Modern English: the common and the genitive case. The common case is unmarked both in meaning and in form. It has a very general meaning which is specified by means of word-order and prepositions and which may be characterized only negatively as non-genitive form. It is represented by a zero exponent. Nouns in the common case can perform any function in the sentence,

E.g. Suddenly the weather changed (a subject).

He touched my hand (a direct object).

The man gave the baby a stick of candy (an indirect object).

Mrs. Hall didn't ask about her affairs (an indirect prepositional object).

He was a shy man (a part of the nominal verbal predicative).

She is in the souvenir shop (an attributive).

He hadn't seen Mable for seven years (an adverbial modifier of time).

Form of the Genitive case

The genitive case is marked both in meaning and in form. The regular way of forming the genitive case of singular nouns is by adding an apostrophe and 's' (my sister's little girl fell downstairs). There are two ways of forming the genitive case of plural nouns: by adding 's' and an apostrophe (Even grandmothers' dreams don't come true) or just an apostrophe (when a noun ends in -s or e.g. the children' room).

Meaning of the Genitive case

The most common meaning of the genitive case is that of possessing (She would inherit her mother's money), that's why professor Smirnitsky said that the genitive case should be called the possessive case. Reznik thinks that the meaning of possessing is not the only meaning of the genitive case. In Old English the genitive case had a very wide range of meanings and was freely used with all nouns, not only attributively, but also as an object and as an adverbial modifier. In Modern English the use of the genitive case is restricted mainly to nouns denoting human beings and time,

E.g. I saw the man's face.

...that was still a lot of money for a day's work.

e.g. peace treaty, car track, arms race, wildlife movement, teenage smoking rate, frontline soldiers, Labour ministers, sports editor, bank raid, defense cuts, oil painting, opinion poll.

Use of the Genitive case

As to the use of the genitive case, we can mention that it falls under dependent genitive case and absolute genitive case. The dependent genitive is used with the noun it modifies and comes before it (He stared at his aunt's face). The absolute genitive occurs independently, when the leading noun has been mentioned before (to avoid repetition) or without a leading noun to denote places (Jones' car is the same as Bill’s, isn't it? I'm going to the dentist's). The absolute genitive may be introduced by the preposition 'of' (He is a good friend of my husband's).

Linguistic status of ‘s

Vorontsova denies the existence of the genitive case in Modern English. She gives the following proofs:

1) The use of the genitive case inflection 'apostrophe and -s' is optional. It is usually used with reference, with human beings, with nouns denoting animals, inanimate things and abstract notions. The genitive case relation is rendered by the of-combination (The head of our white horse. I sat at the foot of the bed).

What is more, even those nouns which do admit of the genitive case often resort to the prepositional combination to render the meaning of the genitive case,

E.g. From the corner of my eyes I thought I had seen something small and white fly from Julian's body.

I couldn't see the body of Julian.

2) One and the same inflection is used both in the singular (a man's hat) and in the plural (men's hats) which is usually not to be found in other languages,

E.g. мальчика (genitive sing.) - мальчиков (genitive pl.)

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Smirnitsky does not share Vorontsova's conception. He look upon the 's as a grammatical morpheme of case.

1) Its general meaning 'the relation of a noun to another word' is a typical case meaning;

2) Although the use of the Genitive case is comparatively restricted, and the propositional group with 'of' is very often used in the same sense, the inflected Genitive can be formed from any noun;

3) One and the same inflection occurs in the singular and in the plural only in nouns that form the plural in the irregular way, and such nouns constitute an insignificant minority;

4) Historically, 's goes back to the Old English Genitive case inflection -es. The latter may be proved by comparing English with the Scandinavian languages which had very much in common. In the Scandinavian languages the Genitive case had be developing in the same way.

Barkhudarov thinks that neither of the two interpretations is convincing. We can't follow Vorontsova and say that 's is a word because:

1) In the English language there are no words which consisted only of one consonant;

2) If 's were a word, then it would be impossible to account for the morphological structure of such constructions as 'the boys' friends', where one and the same morpheme would have to be regarded as a morpheme when rendering the grammatical meaning of the plural number, and as a word when rendering the grammatical meaning of the Genitive case. The latter is absurd.

So, Barkhudarov draws the conclusion that 's is neither a word, nor an ordinary morpheme. It is a specific morpheme which may be and is attached not only to separate words, but occasionally also to combinations of words.