- "A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and numerals) which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording."
Understanding the usage, meaning and variations of the grammatical cases that a language uses.
Nominative Case: The case used for the subject of a sentence.
Genitive Case: The case used to indicate possession or the relationship between nouns.
Dative Case: The case used to indicate the indirect object or the recipient of an action.
Accusative Case: The case used to indicate the direct object of a sentence.
Ablative Case: The case used to indicate separation or the place from which an action starts.
Vocative Case: The case used when addressing someone directly.
Locative Case: The case used to indicate the location of something.
Instrumental Case: The case used to indicate the instrument or means by which something is done.
Absolute Construction: A construction using the genitive or ablative case, expressing a condition which must be met.
Partitive Construction: A construction using the genitive case, indicating a part of something.
Prepositions: Words that indicate the relationship between nouns, often taking a specific case.
Subjunctive: A mood used to express doubt, hypothetical situations or emotions. The subjunctive often appears in subordinate clauses or reported speech.
Relative Clause: A clause that modifies a noun and provides additional information about it.
The Declension of Nouns: The system through which nouns change form depending on their case and gender.
The Conjugation of Verbs: The system through which verbs change form depending on tense, mood, voice, and person.
Nominative case: This case indicates the subject of the sentence. In English, it is often marked by the base form of a noun or pronoun.
Genitive case: This case usually indicates possession or relationship. In English, it is marked with "of" or an apostrophe.
Dative case: This case indicates the indirect object of a verb or the object of certain prepositions. In English, it is often marked with "to" or "for.".
Accusative case: This case usually indicates the direct object of a verb. In English, it is often marked by using the same form as the nominative case, or by adding "-s" or "-es.".
Ablative case: This case indicates separation, origin, or cause. In some languages, it also indicates the object of certain prepositions.
Vocative case: This case is used to address someone directly. In English, it is often indicated by using the person's name, or by using the same form as the nominative case.
Locative case: This case indicates location or place. In some languages, it also indicates time or other temporal relationships. It is often used with certain prepositions.
- "Languages such as Sanskrit, Kannada, Latin, Tamil, and Russian have extensive case systems, with nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and determiners all inflecting (usually by means of different suffixes) to indicate their case."
- "English has largely lost its inflected case system but personal pronouns still have three cases, which are simplified forms of the nominative, accusative (including functions formerly handled by the dative) and genitive cases."
- "Modern English has three but for pronouns only."
- "They are used with personal pronouns: subjective case (I, you, he, she, it, we, they, who, whoever), objective case (me, you, him, her, it, us, them, whom, whomever) and possessive case (my, mine; your, yours; his; her, hers; its; our, ours; their, theirs; whose; whoever)."
- "Forms such as I, he and we are used for the subject ('I kicked the ball')."
- "Forms such as me, him and us are used for the object ('John kicked me')."
- "As a language evolves, cases can merge, a phenomenon known as syncretism."
- "Bengali, Latin, Russian, Slovak, Kajkavian, Slovenian, and Turkish each have at least six."
- "A role that one of those languages marks by case is often marked in English with a preposition."
- "More formally, case has been defined as 'a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their heads.'"
- "Cases should be distinguished from thematic roles such as agent and patient."
- "Languages having cases often exhibit free word order, as thematic roles are not required to be marked by position in the sentence."
- "Commonly encountered cases include nominative, accusative, dative and genitive."
- "Armenian, Czech, Georgian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Serbian, Croatian, and Ukrainian have seven."
- "For example, the English prepositional phrase with (his) foot (as in 'John kicked the ball with his foot') might be rendered in Russian using a single noun in the instrumental case."
- "or in Ancient Greek as τῷ ποδί (tôi podí, meaning 'the foot') with both words (the definite article, and the noun πούς (poús) 'foot') changing to dative form."
- "In languages such as Latin, several thematic roles are realized by a somewhat fixed case for deponent verbs."
- "Languages such as Bengali, Latin, Russian, Slovak, Kajkavian, Slovenian, and Turkish each have at least six cases."
- "Hungarian has 18."