7. Grammatical category of case

In Old English, the notions of number and case were always expressed by one morpheme. Thus, in the Old English form sta¯na the ending –a expressed simultaneously the plural number and the genitive case. That was typical of an inflected language. A change came already in Middle English, and in Modern English the two notions have been entirely separated.

English nouns have two cases: a common case(e.g. father) and a genitive(or possessive) case (e.g. father’s).

Case is the category of a noun expressing relations between the thing denoted by the noun and other 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.

Thus it is the view of Max Deutschbein that Modern English nouns have four cases, viz. nominative, genitive, dative and accu­sative, of which the genitive can be expressed by the -'s-inflection and by the preposition to, the dative by the preposition to and also by word order, and the accusative is distinguished from the dative by word order alone.

8. Synonymy

Taking up similarity of meaning and contrasts of phonetic shape, we observe that every language has in its vocabulary a variety of words, kindred in meaning but distinct in morphemic composition, pho­nemic shape and usage, ensuring the expression of most delicate shades of thought, feeling and imagination. The more developed the language, the richer the diversity and therefore the greater the possibilities of lexical choice enhancing the effectiveness and precision of speech.

Thus, slay is the synonym of kill but it is elevated and more expres­sive involving cruelty and violence.

Synonyms are words only similar but not identical in mean­ing. This definition is correct but vague. E. g. horse and animal are also semantically similar but not synonymous.

Synonyms can therefore be defined in terms of linguistics as two or more words of the same language, belonging to the same part of speech and possessing one or more identical or nearly identical deno­tational meanings, interchangeable, at least in some contexts without any considerable alteration in denotational meaning, but differing in morphemic composition, phonemic shape, shades of meaning, connota­tions, style, valency and idiomatic use.

The verbs experience, undergo, sustain and suffer, for example, come together, because all four render the notion of experienc­ing something. The verb and the noun experience indicate actual living through something and coming to know it first-hand rather than from hearsay. Undergo applies chiefly to what someone or something bears or is subjected to, as in to undergo an operation, to undergo changes.

The nouns glance, look and glimpse "are indiscriminately used with the verbs give and have: give a look (a glance, a glimpse), have a look (a glance, a glimpse). With the verbs cast and take the word glimpse is not used, so that only the ex­pressions cast a glance (a look) or take a glance (a look) are possible.