How do English people understand the grammatical cases? [closed]

Question

In Czech poetry you can say something like this:

"zvukem kulek k tobe promlouvam"

which is "I speak to you with(through) the sound of bullets/shots"./"Mluvim k tobe se(skrz) zvukem(zvuk) kulek."

But you cannot say: The sounds of bullets to you (I) speak"/"zvukem kulek k tobe promlouvam"

Because "The sounds of bullets" is always nominative case in EN, even though that it's the combination of instrumental and genitive.:

zvukem = instrumental (kym?/cim? zvukem)

kulek = genitive (koho? ceho? kulek)

In English it's nominative, no matter what ;), at least in the written form. I don't know how the EN people translate it in their brains.

The solution would be something like: "Them soundems of bullets to yoem speakujem/speakuji".

-em would be the indicator of instrumental case ;D.

So, e.g. I see EN as very weak competitor in e.g. poetry when compared with languages that use cases (most of Slavic languages, German, Latin, Sanskrit etc.) , because you have everything just in nominative. And sometimes genitive (man's house).

Another advantage of cases is answering to the questions:

Q: "Jak jste se tam dostal?" / "How do you get there?"

A: "Vlakem". / "By train"

So, the EN "By train" would be in Czech "S vlak" which is robot-like talk.

You need to use the correct case not the nominative.

The correct case for this example is instrumental so it could be "S vlakem", which is perfectly fine, but we always drop the "s"/"with(or by)" because we know that from the word vlakEM. "EM" told us that it's instrumental.

It's a little more complicated in real sitautaions, because you have multiple genders and 14 paradigms of noun declension/Slovak has 15 ;D.

Anyway, EN is great for the students, they just need to learn the 1 one word for singular and 1 word for plural ;) and there is in most cases the difference just -s in plural.

You have 4 - 7 or more different sound possibilities and if you multiply that with 3 genders (14 paradigms of noun declension in Cezch) and combine that for 4 or 5 words in the sentence the number of combination is enourmous when compared with English. Not to mention the word order (notice that we are using in all cases just the same 3 words) ;D:

Češi udělali revoluci (The Czechs made a revolution -> stress on "revolution/revoluci")

OR

Revoluci udělali Češi (It was the Czechs who made the revolution -> stress on "Czechs/Češi")

OR

Češi revoluci udělali (The Czechs did make a revolution -> stress on "did/udělali)

which creates even more possibilities in poetry.

My question is how do native English speakers translate the nominative cases in their brains? Does it stay there in nominative. or they translate it to causality-like grammatical cases form?

Answer 1

It's not that everything in English is nominative, it's simply that English doesn't have productive morphological case at all - although there are some remnants of the old English case system, such as in the pronominal system, and the who/whom distinction. Lack of m-case is hardly unusual typologically - neither Chinese not Dutch has it, for example.

To answer your question of how "native English speakers translate the nominative cases in their brains" - assure you that we get by! More seriously, Jean Vergnaud, in a 1977 letter to Chomsky & Lasnik (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262062787_sch_0001.pdf) suggested that all languages possess 'abstract' case underlyingly, and it just so happens that it is spelled-out in languages like Czech, and not in languages like English, Chinese etc. This means that in English, abstract case is assigned based on the structural position of the Noun Phrase - for example, the grammatical subject is assigned abstract nominative, and the grammatical object is assigned accusative case. This conception of case is quite widely accepted in generative linguistics. It's worth emphasising that on this view, case is purely syntactic - it is not taken to dictate the semantic role of a Noun Phrase. A nominative subject can, e.g. be an agent ("She hit John") or a patient ("She was hit by John").

English does indeed rely much more on things like word order - generally speaking, languages with rich case morphology are 'non-configurational', which means that they display more flexible word order. English is conversely 'configurational', so it has a more rigid word order. As an aside, languages like Chinese are an exception - it has no case morphology and free word order. We call these 'discourse configurational' languages.

I'm not sure it's worth seriously addressing your contention that languages without m-case are inferior with regards to poetry, but i'll just add that Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Keats, Wordsworth etc. would beg to differ...

Answer 2

There's more than one way to analyse just about anything in linguistics.

Sometimes which cases a language is analysed to have depends on the number of inflected forms that nominals can take. Well after taking into account which parts of the inflection are due to other factors such as number and gender.

Sometimes which cases a language is analysed to have is based on comparison with a previously analysed language due to tradition. This was once very common using Classical languages such as Latin and Ancient Greek as a basis.

Sometimes which cases a language is analysed to have is based on traditional analysis of the language as it was in former times even though it may have changed quite a bit since. Georgian is usually considered to have the same cases as Old Georgian but in fresh analyses it's been noted that some of the postpositions have

It could even be possible to analyse which cases a language has based more on syntax that morphology, especially for languages which have both inflectional and analytic features. For instance, genitive and dative might be considered to be two cases in a language even though they may share a single inflectional form.

So let's look at English. English nominals are nouns, adjectives, and pronouns.

Nouns have two forms or four forms depending on how the possessive is analysed: dog, dog's, dogs, dogs'

Since number is not related to case this leaves either one or two cases, depending on whether you analyse possessive to be a case. In English three of the forms are the identical in pronunciation but differ in orthography.

Adjectives have three forms, none of which reflect case: big, bigger, biggest.

Pronouns have more forms which reflect cases than nouns have. But again it depends on analysis. Pronouns often share a kind of paradigm with possessive adjectives and are often suppletive: I, me, my, mine.

So pronouns in English would usually be labelled "subject" and "object" and then nouns and adjectives have a "possessive". But not necessarily in your preferred analysis.

You could compare the English "subjective case" to "nominative case", English "objective case" to "dative case", an English "possessive case" to "genitive case".

You could analyse English as having just one case for nouns and two cases for pronouns and not count possessive as a case at all.

So you see there is no "natural law" - there's just many ways to describe what happens using terminology that fits to varying degrees across many languages.