Questions tagged [cases]
Inflectional forms that indicate the grammatical functions of nouns, pronouns and their modifiers (such as adjectives).
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Western European languages tend to have fewer genders and simpler case systems than Eastern European ones, is this due to contact?
You can draw a relatively consistent line through Europe, to the west of which, Indo-European languages mostly have one or two genders and nouns don't inflect for case, and to the east of which, ...
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1answer
301 views
Is there a question about the number of cases in Proto-Indo-European?
I've found this quote in what appears to be the Usenet sci.lang FAQ page:
Earlier historical linguists cheerfully reconstructed eight cases for PIE, on the model of Sanskrit; but the IE languages ...
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1answer
59 views
How many marked cases are there for regular nouns in English?
How many cases are marked for regular nouns in English?
I see online the following:
The English language has just three cases: subjective, possessive and objective. Most nouns, many indefinite ...
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3answers
344 views
Can an object be in functional case A even though it's declined like case B?
Pardon my word choice, since I'm obviously lacking the background in linguistics. I know that language-specific questions are off-topic, yet I still like to use Finnish as an example, since it spawned ...
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3answers
396 views
Why do two English personal pronouns — "you" and "it" — lack an objective case?
Most English person pronouns have an objective case — I/me, we/us, thou/thee, he/him, she/her, they/them, who/whom. But "you" and "it" have no such form. Did they every have one? ...
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1answer
69 views
How should the Albanian "genitive" really be analysed?
The Albanian language is typically described as having a genitive case. In actuality, this "case" consists of an connective particle which agrees in number, gender AND CASE with the ...
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96 views
How did Old Norse influence Old English to lose genders and cases?
Wikipedia says that "Norse influence is ... considered to have stimulated and accelerated the morphological simplification found in Middle English, such as the loss of grammatical gender and ...
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1answer
215 views
why in Polish we change ją to jej when negating the phrase?
ja lubię ją - I like her
ja nie lubię jej - I do not like her
Do I understand correctly what these sentences mean?
If yes, why do we change ją to jej when negating the phrase? In both cases the ...
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67 views
How can the polysemy of the Polish instrumental case be explained?
If the instrumental case in Polish is used to designate the tool with which an action, or state of being, is being performed/is, how is it that the instrumental is also used to express time and ...
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Why does "brother" have the instrumental case in this Polish sentence?
The instrumental case is used to indicate the instrument/object with which an action or state of being is performed. For instance, when you go to work "by car", car is instrumental because ...
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122 views
Origin of Italian plurals
Some sources say that italian plurals come from the nominative case, so "italiano" has the plural "italiani", and "italiana" has the plural "italiane".
However ...
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1answer
79 views
Is the multiplicative case 'validly' present in any languages?
Wikipedia lists something called the 'multiplicative case' in its template of grammatical cases. However, on the (stub) article of said case, it lists only two Uralic languages in which it is found - ...
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1answer
113 views
The easiest model for mapping Hindi oblique case onto Slavic languages' case systems
How can Hindi Oblique case be mapped into Slavic cases of languages such as Polish or Russian? My intuition is that Oblique case stands for all the Polish cases, except the nominative. That is, for ...
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92 views
What is the origin of certain Hungarian suffixes?
I have a question about the etymology (within the Uralic family) of three Hungarian morphemes
Accusative -t- suffix: Hungarian has an accusative in -t- (eg. fíu, fíut), which has no cognates in any ...
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110 views
What is the definition of a “case” in grammar?
Among others, according to Wikipedia:
"Case" is a linguistics term regarding a manner of categorizing nouns,
pronouns, adjectives, participles, and numerals according to their
traditionally ...
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1answer
109 views
The term for the state of a noun
In linguistics, a case is how a noun declines with respect to its grammatical function within a given phrase, clause, or sentence. Is there a linguistics term to refer to the “state” of a noun within ...
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4answers
140 views
What can explain the appearance of "self-made" language features if neither of languages a person speaks or learns have similar features?
I know a woman, whose native language is Kyrgyz (Turkic family) and who learned Russian as an adult (mostly, maybe she was somewhat exposed to it before as well).
What striked me is that she invented ...
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40 views
How do I know if ECM happens in a foreign language?
I have learned about ECM and how it works within the English language, but I don't understand it thoroughly. How would we be able to decide whether a language has ECM?
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How common object/subject case being applied to determiners/demonstrative/articles instead of nouns?
I'm talking about a language where say, a certain case is only expressed on the determiners/demonstrative/article?
So they might say for example:
Which-a Cat?
Which-LOC. Cat?
Rather than:
Which Cat-...
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2answers
493 views
Is it possible in Sanskrit to distinguish between the names Rāma and Rām i.e. राम and राम् when used in a sentence?
Consider this sentence:
रामो लेखन्या लिखति
Is रामो in that sentence always referring to someone named राम (Rāma) or could it be equally possible that the person's name was राम् (Rām)? Are names like ...
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1answer
183 views
Are dative governing verbs in IE languages mainly inherited from PIE, or later developed within each IE language?
Some typical dative governing verbs in many IE case-inflecting languages are "help", "give" etc.. Are they mainly inherited from PIE or are they developed within each language? If ...
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3answers
597 views
Is a final -u in Semitic languages known outside of Akkadian?
Consider Akkadian bētu vs. Hebrew bayit (בַּיִת) (meaning "house") and Akkadian daltu vs. Hebrew delet (דֶּלֶת) (meaning "door"). Are these endings known outside of Akkadian? If so, when did they ...
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1answer
47 views
subject of a to-infinitive - is it a nominative or an accusative?
Is the subject of a to-infinitive a nominative, because it's a subject, or an accusative, because it's assigned the Case by 'for'?
The man kept the door open for the cat to enter the room.
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76 views
A-positions where no structural Case is available?
I am a little puzzled. Is there any such thing as an A-position where no structural Case is available? The arguments are either a nominative or an accusative (structural Cases) aren't they?
[...] ...
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78 views
Two questions about Icelandic (syntax)
The following sentence is from Icelandic language:
Mér vir›ast tNP [hestarnir vera seinir]
meDAT seemPL the-horsesNOM be slow
‘It seems to me that the horses are slow.'
...
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41 views
Is there a language where presence/absence of V-O agreement would reflect presence/absence of accusative case?
I am trying to find a language which would show the following pattern with respect to agreement/morphological Case:
presence of verb-object morphological agreement yields accusative morphology
...
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1answer
75 views
What is case for pronouns in different positions? [closed]
Can we say "the case of subject in a sentence is nominative, the direct object of a verb is accusative, the second object of a ditransitive verb is accusative, the objective of a preposition is ...
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3answers
6k views
What are the subjective and objective genitives?
I have recently come across the terms subjective genitive and objective genitive, but I don't fully understand them.
From what I have read, an example might be 'the love of God', as in 'the love of ...
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105 views
What is meant by the term 'genitive of appurtenance'
In his Sanskrit Grammar, William Dwight Whitney describes the uses of the genitive case in Sanskrit and he mentions the 'genitive of possession or appurtenance':
The genitive in its normal ...
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4answers
740 views
Do languages with cases frequently have verbs which use particular cases for their objects?
Turkish, German, Russian, Greek and Latin are examples of languages with declension. They also have lists of verbs for which the verb's single object takes a particular case apart from the "normal" ...
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1answer
73 views
Global case map
A lot of European languages, especially Finnish (not an INDO European language) have cases. English for the most part doesn’t. Other languages don’t. I have seen maps of grammar features around the ...
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2answers
162 views
Case in English phrase "friend of mine"
In English phrases like
Jesse is a friend of mine/*of me
the case of the word "mine" is not the oblique ("me") which usually occurs with prepositions ("That's a part of me that you don't see too ...
3
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3answers
272 views
Case in German Nouns
German has an interesting situation in its noun phrases - articles and adjectives reflect case, but the noun itself does not.
Der große Mann sieht das Haus. ("The big man sees the house," ...
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1answer
605 views
Absense of cases in Bulgarian
Nowadays, Bulgarian and Macedonian are the only Slavic languages where the system of cases isn't developed. Bulgarian and Macedonian are very close to each other, but are considered to be 2 ...
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1answer
780 views
What is the meaning of the Latin names of grammatical cases (in general, not in Latin)?
I cannot find any source explaining the Latin names of grammatical cases. I am especially curious in the names of the less common cases, like in Finnish:
nominative
genitive
accusative
partitive
...
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125 views
Is Finnish harder than Latin? [closed]
I'm not interested in learning Finnish, but I do have some interest in Latin. I suspect that this is the case (no pun intended) because Latin only has 5 cases (plus a 6th that is used sparingly), but ...
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1answer
128 views
How does the Thai language express the instrumental?
In English and many European languages the instrumental is expressed with a preposition:
I eat noodles with chopsticks.
(But "with" is not dedicated to this function and has other uses such as the ...
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1answer
281 views
What is the difference between the nominative case and the subject?
I'm studying Japanese and recently I came across the term "double nominatives". The idea is that ga marks the nominative case, so a phrase with two ga has two phrases in the nominative case:
boku ga ...
6
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1answer
160 views
What is considered a grammatical case in the framework of turkic languages?
Let's take kazakh language as an example. In every source I've read there are 7 cases in kazakh language:
nominative üi - a house, baqşa - garden;
genitive üi-diŋ - of a house, baqşa-niŋ - of a ...
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6answers
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What is the difference between case and adpositions?
The preposition expressions like "on top of the table", "under the tree", "above the building" are very well understood. Comparing these with the Germany noun cases "auf dem Tisch", "unter dem Baum", "...
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35 views
Are there languages in which overt morphological accusative case is obligatory on the second conjunct of a conjunction?
For example: (1) The officer believed [NP Mary and me]
Of course, the distribution of ACC pronouns in English doesn't really map onto ACC in overt morphological case languages.
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1answer
507 views
Grammatical case vs semantic case
I'm not sure what these terms mean. In my lecture notes I wrote that grammatical case is used to show the syntactic functions of a nominal syntagm, depending on its relation to the verb. Semantic case,...
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1answer
100 views
What cases are typical for nouns accompanying the subject?
In the phrase "I went to the shops with a friend", "a friend" is the accompanier, while I am the subject.
Some languages, such as Finnish (I believe) have a comitative case, which is taken by an ...
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117 views
Are there other languages, besides Latin, where a gender of a noun is determined by its genitive case ending?
Are there other languages, besides Latin, where a gender of a noun is determined by its genitive case ending?
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1answer
95 views
Is there a name other than “absolute” for this kind of construction?
In some languages there are absolute constructions like the Genitive Absolute in Greek:
Καὶ ἤδη ὥρας πολλῆς γενομένης προσελθόντες αὐτῷ οἱ μαθηταὶ αὐτοῦ ἔλεγον ὅτι ἔρημός ἐστιν ὁ τόπος καὶ ἤδη ὥρα ...
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1answer
110 views
Problem with [NOMINATIVE] Case in GB & Phase Theory (MP)
Most of works on case theory in generative syntax GB (Vergnaud, 1985; Chomsky, 1981, 1986, among others) and in MP (Chomsky, 1995, et seq; Gallego, 2010; Hornstein, 2011, among others) assume the ...
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1answer
145 views
"To whom" in pied-piped infinitive relative clauses
In English wh raised from, or in situ in, a direct object or prepositional object, you can almost always use "who" at least as well as "whom",1 and in some cases you can only use "who":
Who/whom did ...
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0answers
262 views
Direct–inverse marking on the noun, or the possiblity of inverse alignment
A direct-inverse language, Wikipedia claims, is one which
involve[s] different grammar for transitive predications according to the relative positions of their "subject" and their "object" on a ...
2
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1answer
632 views
Drawing case specified trees for english gerunds
I'm reading Adger's Core Syntax book and am having a tough time with Exercise 1 of the functional categories chapter.
The exercise is about gerunds. Gerunds are specified by the form of suffixing -...
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1answer
403 views
Should Japanese postpositions be treated as belonging to the same category as English prepositions?
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language and WALS, as well as Wikipedia, treat both English prepositions and Japanese postpositions (particles) as belonging to 'adpositions' (although CGEL ...
