8. Case in nouns.

Case expresses the relation of a word to another word in the word-group or sentence (my sister’s coat). The category of case correlates with the objective category of possession.

1. Traditional (morphological) approach: The case category in English is realized through the opposition:The Common Case vs. The Possessive Case(sister vs. sister’s) = privative binary opposition.

2. Non-morphological approach (the positional theory) by John Nesfield and Max Deutschbein: They follow the patterns of classical Latin grammar, distinguishing nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and vocative cases in English. Since there are no special morphological marks to distinguish these cases in English (except for the genitive), the cases are differentiated by the functional position of the noun in the sentence, e.g.: the nominative case corresponds with the subject, the accusative case with the direct object, the dative case with indirect object, and the vocative case with the address. Case distinctions are expressed by syntactic position of a word in a sentence.

3. The theory of analytical case forms (the prepositional-positional theory) by George Curme:Case relations are expressed by the prepositions or their absence and the position of a noun.e.g.: the dative case is expressed by nouns with the prepositions ‘to’ and ‘for’, the genitive case by nouns with the preposition ‘of’, the instrumental case by nouns with the preposition ‘with’, e.g.: for the girl, of the girl, with a key.

No cases theory by Mukhin, Eshkova, Vorontosa: The English noun has lost the category of case. The ‘s inflection may be added to a group of nouns or even a whole clause, e.g.: Tom and Mary’s wedding, London street//London’s street.