3. The category of case

“Case is a formal category of the noun which defines its relations to other units” [Longman Grammar 2000: 292]. In Old English there were 4 cases distinguished by inflection: nominative, genitive, dative and accusative. Inflections have been much reduced in present day English, and their role as syntactic signals has to a large extent been taken over by word order and function words. The only remaining case inflection for nouns is the genitive.

A noun that is not marked by a genitive inflection is said to be in the common case. The common case is used in a wide range of syntactic roles and is by far the most frequent form of a noun.

Thus from the point of view of form case is a morphological category, it preserves its syntactic nature from the point of view of its content. This is due to the fact that case indicates relations between the noun and words syntactically connected with it (as compared with such pure morphological categories as Number and Gender).

The English case system is characterized by a number of peculiar features:

1. The case system of nouns does not coincide with the case system of pronouns, which rarely happens in other languages.

2. The genitive use of an English noun depends on the lexical meaning of the noun, which is also characteristic of English only.

3. Nouns in the genitive occur only in the attributive function and only pre-modifying the head word (cf.: the post-modifying position in Russian: дом Петра, чашка молока).

4. English is characterized by the group genitive (somebody else’s child, the Prime Minister of England’s speech).

Another complication is rooted in the diversity of types of genitives that correspond to different meanings conveyed by this form. Longman Grammar offers the following classification:

1. Specifying genitives that specify the reference of the noun phrase in the same way as a determiner: the girl’s face, the artist’s first axiom.

2. Classifying genitives that are close to adjectives: a bird’s nest, children’s clothes.

3. Genetives of time: yesterday’s job, the autumn’s statement.

4. Genetives of measure include:

   • genitives of duration (an hour’s discussion, a minute’s hesitation);

   • genitives of distance (at arm’s length);

   • genitives of value ( 50 pounds’ worth).

5. Elliptic genitives, or independent genitives: If a car’s dirty, it’s a woman’s (News). Many of them have become conventionalized: Macy’s; Marks & Spencer’s, McDonald’s.

6. Group genitives – when a genitive suffix is attached in the last word of a genitive phrase: Cedric and Jane’s house, the father of five’s case.

7. Double genitive is a special construction that makes it possible for the same head noun to take a specifying genitive and another determiner: a (determiner) bun of Mummy’s (specifying genitive); a good idea of Johnny’s; a friend of ours.

All this leads to a rigorous discussion of the problem of case in English nouns. Historically there are several approaches to the problem under analysis. Their existence is a result of a complex interplay of the factors described above.

The first grammarian who suggested and proved the existence of a two case system in English was H. Sweet. He wrote that if we take into account only the meaning rendered by English nouns in different usage, we are able to distinguish between 5 cases. They will be: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative and Vocative. But the point is that the factor of meaning taken alone is not sufficient. It is necessary to take into account the factor of form too. In other words there must be some formal sign (an inflexion) of a case. So his idea was that cases must be distinguished on the basis of two criteria – meaning and form. And according to his principle, two cases can be singled out in English – the Possessive case (having the formal sign ‘s) and the Common case (having no such sign). The term Common Case was also introduced by H. Sweet. O. Jespersen also supported this approach.

Nevertheless there are some other approaches to this problem. Thus, G. Curme, a representative of Classical Scientific Grammar, put forward a theory according to which there are four cases in English: Nominative, Accusative, Dative, and Genitive. The cases other than the Nominative are called the oblique cases. These four cases are recognized on the basis of the functions performed by the noun in the corresponding case. M. Deutschbein (1928) stuck to the same argumentation. E. Sonnenschein in “The Soul of Grammar” even insisted that English has the Vocative Case as well since we may prepose the interjection oh before a name.

The traditional approach to the problem of case in English is that there are two cases in English nouns – the unmarked Common Case and the marked, Possessive Case. Nowadays there are a lot of adherents of this theory, e.g. R. Quirk, S. Greenbaum, G. Leech, J. Svartvik (A University Grammar of English, 1973), Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum (A Student's Introduction to English Grammar, 2006). Among Russian linguists there are also supporters of the two-case system. They are A.I. Smirnitsky, L.S. Barkhudarov, V.N. Zhigadlo, I.P. Ivanova, L.L. Ioffic, V.N. Yartseva, M.M. Gukhman, B.A. Ilyish (1971), V.M. Zhirmunsky. One of the clearest and most unambiguous definitions of case was given by B.A. Ilyish: case is the category of a noun expressing relations between the thing denoted by the noun and things or properties or actions, and manifested by some formal sign in the noun itself. This sign is almost always an inflection, and it may also be a zero sign, i.e. the absence of any sign may be significant as distinguishing one particular case from another. It is obvious that the minimum number of cases in a given language system is two, since the existence of two correlated elements at least is needed to establish a category. So the viewpoint expressed by B.A. Ilyish is that case is part of the morphological system of a language and consequently he won’t recognize any cases expressed by non-morphological means.

But the two-case system was also criticized and its critics were mostly Russian linguists. They noticed the difficulty in the identification of the meaning of the Common case which is contrary to what can be found in inflected languages. As it is known in inflected languages each case has its own meaning and function. Moreover the cases do not overlap in their meaning and function.

The problem with the Common Case was that when linguists tried to identify the meaning of the Common case in positive terms they found it next to impossible. It turned out that the meaning of the Common case could only be identified in the negative terms – as non-possessive. That was the definition of the Common case given by Prof. A.I. Smirnitsky. But this definition did not satisfy grammarians.

They began to analyze the two-case system from the point of view of their function and they found out that the Common Case does not have specific syntactic function of its own, the Common and the Possessive cases can be interchangeable, e.g. London airport, the Pushkin Museum. Here we have the noun in the Common case in the function typical for the Possessive Case – that of the pre-modifying attribute.

Then the Possessive case was analyzed closely as well and it appeared that it was equally impossible to identify its meaning. In the vast majority of phrases the Possessive Case has the meaning of possession (my father’s book). But this is not the only meaning. It also expresses the meaning of measure (a mile’s distance), local relations (at the baker’s), temporal meaning (a minute’s wait). When analyzed from the functional point of view the Possessive Case appeared not to have a syntactic position of its own. The most typical syntactical function of the Possessive Case is considered to be the function of the pre-modifying attribute (my sister’s pen). But it can be used also in other syntactic functions typical of the Common Case (at my sister’s; My father’s was a difficult problem; a friend of my father’s). All these factors contribute to the complexity of the grammatical content of the Possessive case.

This comparative analysis of the two cases enabled linguists to draw the conclusion that the two cases are not opposed to each other either in their syntactic function (they can perform the same syntactic functions) or in meaning (for the Possessive Case the meaning can be identified as that of possession, but as far as the Common case is concerned, its meaning can be identified only in negative terms).

The first linguist who denied the existence of cases in English was Professor G.N. Vorontsova in 1948. She gave the following reasons for that:

1. The post-modifying element ‘s is but loosely connected with the noun, which finds the clearest expression in its use not only with single nouns, but also with whole word-groups of various status: the man I saw yesterday’s son; the man who had hauled him out to dinner’s head.

2. There is an indisputable parallelism of functions between the possessive post-modifying constructions and the pre-modifying constructions. This can be proved by the corresponding transpositions like: the daughter of somebody else, the head of the man who had hauled him out to dinner, the son of the man I saw yesterday.

Among the proponents of this theory there are such linguists as B.A. Ilyish (1948) and A.M. Mukhin. B.A. Ilyish notes that the ending –s’ is the only remnant of the old case system of English nouns. Its meaning is being revised within the analytical system of the English language. It is turning into a formal particle, a specific equivalent of the preposition of [Ильиш 1948: 100]. This theory is supported by the authors of a University grammar of English published in the GDR in 1977 [English Grammar Leipzig 1977: 63]. They also point out that the Possessive form has a different meaning. As its function is to determine the following noun this form is dealt with as a possessive determiner, and the status of a formant is attached to ‘s.

Nowadays linguists think it more reasonable and convenient for teaching purposes to leave the two-case system of the English noun. Recognizing the existence of two cases in English, linguists are still trying to single out the meanings of the Possessive Case. In their opinion [Гуревич 2003: 9-10] these meanings can boil down to two items:

1. the meaning of possession that is interpreted in broad terms (John’s house / wife / friend / work) including the designation of the subject of an action (John’s arrival). It’s of interest to note that the English Possessive case does not express the meaning of an object of an action (cf. in Russian: чтение книг). This makes the Possessive form in English devoid of the ambiguous characteristic of the corresponding Russian phrase (приглашение писателя may be both the writer’s invitation and an invitation of the writer).

2. classifying (descriptive) meaning that displays the similarity of the Possessive Case to adjectives and other noun pre-modifiers: children’s books; an officer’s cap; a bird’s nest.

Mention should be made of the main tendencies in the occurrence of cases in English. First of all, s-genitives are outnumbered by of-phrases in all registers. Secondly, genitives based on nouns with human reference are more common than any other. Dependent genitives are far more common in news than in any other registers (news is followed by fiction, then go conversation and academic prose) as they serve the purposes of journalism well, in allowing the information to be presented in a concise way [Longman Grammar 2000].