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A grammatical case is a category of and noun modifiers (, , , and numerals) that corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nominal groups consisting of a noun and its modifiers belong to one of a few such categories. For instance, in English language, one says I see them and they see me: the nominative case pronouns represent the perceiver, and the accusative case pronouns me/them represent the phenomenon perceived. Here, nominative and accusative are cases, that is, categories of pronouns corresponding to the functions they have in representation.
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 case), and Genitive case cases. They are used with : 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; whosever). Forms such as I, he, and we are used for the subject (" I kicked John"), and forms such as me, him, and us are used for the object ("John kicked me").
As a language evolves, cases can merge (for instance, in Ancient Greek, the locative case merged with the dative), a phenomenon known as syncretism.
Languages such as Sanskrit, Latin, and Russian language have extensive case systems, with nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and determiners all inflecting (usually by means of different ) to indicate their case. The number of cases differs between languages: For example, modern Standard Arabic and modern English have three, but only for pronouns; Hungarian is among those with the most, with its 18 cases.
Commonly encountered cases include nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. A role that one of those languages marks by case is often marked in English with a preposition. 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 (, meaning "the foot") with both words – the definite article, and the noun () "foot" – changing to dative form.
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. They are often closely related, and in languages such as Latin, several thematic roles are realised by a somewhat fixed case for deponent verbs, but cases are a syntagmatic / phrasal category, and thematic roles are the function of a syntagma / phrase in a larger structure. Languages having cases often exhibit free word order, as thematic roles are not required to be marked by position in the sentence.
The equivalent to "case" in several other European languages also derives from casus, including in French, in Italian and in German. The Russian word паде́ж ( padyézh) is a calque from Greek and similarly contains a root meaning "fall", and the German and Czech simply mean "fall", and are used for both the concept of grammatical case and to refer to physical falls. The Dutch equivalent translates as 'noun case', in which 'noun' has the older meaning of both 'adjective (noun)' and '(substantive) noun'. The Finnish equivalent is , whose main meaning is "position" or "place".
Similar to Latin, Sanskrit uses the term विभक्ति (vibhakti) which may be interpreted as the specific or distinct "bendings" or "experiences" of a word, from the verb भुज् (bhuj) and the prefix वि (vi), and names the individual cases using ordinal numbers.
The eight historical Indo-European cases are as follows, with examples either of the English case or of the English syntactic alternative to case:
| Nominative case | Subject of a finite verb | we | We went to the store. | Who or what? | Corresponds to English's . |
| Accusative case | Direct object of a transitive verb | us, for us, the (object) | The clerk remembered us.
John ate the apple at the bus stop. Obey the law. | Whom or what? | Corresponds to English's . Together with dative, it forms modern English's oblique case. |
| Dative case | Indirect object of a verb | us, to us, to the (object) | The clerk gave us a discount.
The clerk gave a discount to us. John waited for us at the bus stop. According to the law... | To whom or what? | Corresponds to English's and preposition to and for constructions before the object, both often marked by a definite article the. Together with accusative, it forms modern English's oblique case. |
| Ablative case | Movement away from | from us | The pigeon flew from us to a steeple. | Whence? From where/whom? | |
| Genitive case | Possessor of another noun | 's,
of (the) | John's book was on the table.
The pages of the book turned yellow. The table is made out of wood. | Whose? From what or what of? | Roughly corresponds to English's possessive (possessive determiners and pronouns) and preposition of construction. |
| Vocative case | Addressee | John,
O foolish dreamer, Madam Chair, | John, are you all right?
Now, ladies and gentlemen, we are proud to present… O Canada, we stand on guard for thee | Which John? John who? Who are you calling foolish? | Roughly corresponds to the formal, poetic or reverential use of "O" in English. |
| Locative case | Location, either physical or temporal | in Japan,
at the bus stop, in the future | We live in Japan.
John is waiting for us at the bus stop. We will see what will happen in the future. | Where or wherein? When? | Roughly corresponds to English prepositions in, on, at, and by and other less common prepositions. |
| Instrumental | A means or tool used in/while performing an action | with a mop,
by hand | We wiped the floor with a mop.
This letter was written by hand. | How? With what or using what? By what means? | Corresponds to English prepositions by, with and via as well as synonymous constructions such as using, by use of and through. |
All of the above are just rough descriptions; the precise distinctions vary significantly from language to language, and as such they are often more complex. Case is based fundamentally on changes to the noun to indicate the noun's role in the sentence – one of the defining features of so-called fusional languages. Old English was a fusional language, but Modern English does not work this way.
Taken as a whole, English personal pronouns are typically said to have three morphological cases:
Most English personal pronouns have five forms: the nominative case form, the oblique case form, a distinct reflexive or intensive form (such as myself, ourselves) which is based upon the possessive determiner form but is coreferential to a preceding instance of nominative or oblique, and the possessive case forms, which include both a determiner form (such as my, our) and a predicatively used independent form (such as mine, ours) which is distinct (with two exceptions: the third person singular masculine he and the third person singular neuter it, which use the same form for both determiner and independent his). The interrogative personal pronoun who exhibits the greatest diversity of forms within the modern English pronoun system, having definite nominative, oblique, and genitive forms (who , whom , whose ) and equivalently-coordinating indefinite forms (whoever , whomever , and whosever ). The pronoun "where" has a corresponding set of derived forms (whither , whence''), but they're considered archaic.
Although English pronouns can have subject and object forms (he/him, she/her), nouns show only a singular/plural and a possessive/non-possessive distinction (e.g. chair, chairs, chair's, chairs'); there is no manifest difference in the form of chair between "The chair is here." (subject) and "I own the chair." (direct object), a distinction made instead by word order and context.
This is, however, only a general tendency. Many forms of Central German, such as Colognian and Luxembourgish, have a dative case but lack a genitive. In Irish language nouns, the nominative and accusative have fallen together, whereas the dative–locative, genitive, and vocative have remained separate. In many modern Indo-Aryan languages, the accusative, genitive, and dative have merged to an oblique case, but many of these languages still retain vocative, locative, and ablative cases. Old English had an instrumental case, but not a locative case.
Latin grammars, such as Ars grammatica, followed the Greek tradition, but added the ablative case of Latin. Later other European languages also followed that Graeco-Roman tradition.
However, for some languages, such as Latin, due to case syncretism the order may be changed for convenience, where the accusative or the vocative cases are placed after the nominative and before the genitive. For example:
| { class="wikitable" | + Latin ! rowspan="2" | ! colspan="2" water ! colspan="2" | war | |
For similar reasons, the customary order of the four cases in Icelandic is nominative–accusative–dative–genitive, as illustrated below:
Sanskrit similarly arranges cases in the order nominative-accusative-instrumental-dative-ablative-genitive-locative-vocative. The cases are individually named as the "first," "second," "third", and so on. For example, the common "when-then" construction is called the सति सप्तमी ( Sati Saptami) or "The Good Seventh" as it uses the locative, which is the seventh case.
In Indo-European languages, declension patterns may depend on a variety of factors, such as gender, number, phonological environment, and irregular historical factors. Pronouns sometimes have separate paradigms. In some languages, particularly Slavic languages, a case may contain different groups of endings depending on whether the word is a noun or an adjective. A single case may contain many different endings, some of which may even be derived from different roots. For example, in Polish, the genitive case has -a, -u, -ów, -i/-y, -e- for nouns, and -ego, -ej, -ich/-ych for adjectives. To a lesser extent, a noun's animacy or humanness may add another layer of complexity. For example, in Russian:
vs.
and
To illustrate this paradigm in action, take the case-system of Wanyjirra for whose description Senge invokes this system. Each of the case markers functions in the prototypical relational sense, but many extend into these additional functions:
However, this is by no means always the case or even the norm for Australian languages. For many, case-affixes are considered special-clitics (i.e. phrasal-affixes, see Anderson 2005) because they have a singular fixed position within the phrase. For Bardi language, the case marker usually appears on the first phrasal constituent while the opposite is the case for Wangkatja (i.e. the case marker is attracted to the rightmost edge of the phrase). See the following examples respectively:
Some of them can be re-declined, even more than once, as if they were nouns (usually, from the genitive locative case), although they mainly work as noun modifiers before a noun clause:
An example with the feminine definite article with the German word for "woman".
An example with the neuter definite article with the German word for "book".
Proper names for cities have two Genitive case nouns:
The other cases are constructed adpositionally using the case-marking postpositions using the nouns and pronouns in their oblique cases. The oblique case is used exclusively with these 8 case-marking postpositions of Hindi-Urdu forming 10 grammatical cases, which are: ergative ने (ne), dative and accusative को (ko), instrumental and ablative से (se), genitive का (kā), inessive में (mẽ), adessive पे (pe), terminative तक (tak), semblative सा (sā).
vo
For some toponyms, a seventh case, the locative case, also exists, such as Mediolān ī (in Milan).
The Romance languages have largely abandoned or simplified the grammatical cases of Latin. Much like English, most Romance case markers survive only in pronouns.
Up to ten additional cases are identified by linguists, although today all of them are either incomplete (do not apply to all nouns or do not form full word paradigm with all combinations of gender and number) or degenerate (appear identical to one of the main six cases). The most recognized additional cases are locative (в лесу́, на мосту́, в слеза́х), partitive (ча́ю, са́хару, песку́), and two forms of vocative — old (Го́споди, Бо́же, о́тче) and neo-vocative (Маш, пап, ребя́т). Sometimes, so called count-form (for some countable nouns after numerals) is considered to be a sub-case.
vṛkṣaḥ
vṛkṣa
vṛkṣeṇa
vṛkṣābhyām
However, the cases may be deployed for other than the default thematic roles. A notable example is the passive construction. In the following sentence, Devadatta is the kartā, but appears in the instrumental case, and rice, the karman, object, is in the nominative case (as subject of the verb). The declensions are reflected in the morphemes -ena and -am.
The accusative can exist only in the noun(whether it is derived from a verb or not). For example, "Arkadaşlar bize gel meyi düşünüyorlar." (Friends are thinking of com ing to us).
The dative can exist only in the noun (whether it is derived from a verb or not). For example, "Bol bol kitap oku maya çalışıyorum." (I try to read a lot of books). 2. accusative affix -mayı 3. dative affix -maya ;
The evolution of the treatment of case relationships can be circular. can become unstressed and sound like they are an unstressed syllable of a neighboring word. A postposition can thus merge into the stem of a head noun, developing various forms depending on the phonological shape of the stem. Affixes are subject to various phonological processes such as assimilation, vowel centering to the schwa, phoneme loss, and fusion, and these processes can reduce or even eliminate the distinctions between cases. Languages can then compensate for the resulting loss of function by creating postpositions, thus coming full circle.
Recent experiments in agent-based modeling have shown how case systems can emerge and evolve in a population of language users.Remi van Trijp, " The Evolution of Case Systems for Marking Event Structure ". In: Steels, Luc (Ed.), Experiments in Cultural Language Evolution, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012, p. 169-205. The experiments demonstrate that language users may introduce new case markers to reduce the cognitive effort required for semantic interpretation, hence facilitating communication through language. Case markers then become generalized through analogical reasoning and reuse.
The following are systems that some languages use to mark case instead of, or in addition to, declension:
The lemma form of words, which is the form chosen by convention as the canonical form of a word, is usually the most markedness or basic case, which is typically the nominative, trigger, or absolutive case, whichever a language may have.
Case concord systems
In the most common case concord system, only the head-word (the noun) in a phrase is marked for case. This system appears in many Papuan languages as well as in Turkic languages, Mongolian, Quechua language, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, and other languages. In Basque language and various Amazonian and Australian languages, only the phrase-final word (not necessarily the noun) is marked for case. In many Indo-European, Finnic languages, and Semitic languages, case is marked on the noun, the determiner, and usually the adjective. Other systems are less common. In some languages, there is Suffixaufnahme of a word as both genitive (to indicate semantic role) and another case such as accusative (to establish concord with the head noun).
Declension paradigms
Declension is the process or result of altering nouns to the correct grammatical cases. Languages with rich nominal inflection (using grammatical cases for many purposes) typically have a number of identifiable declension classes, or groups of nouns with a similar pattern of case inflection or declension. Sanskrit has six declension classes, whereas Latin is traditionally considered to have Latin declension, and Ancient Greek three. For example, Slovak has fifteen noun declension classes, five for each gender (the number may vary depending on which paradigms are counted or omitted, this mainly concerns those that modify declension of foreign words; refer to article).
Examples
Arabic
An example of a Standard Arabic case inflection is given below, using the singular forms of the Arabic term for "book" كِتَاب :
The modern Arabic colloquial dialects have abandoned the grammatical cases of Classical Arabic, and they are only used nowadays in Modern Standard Arabic. Standard Arabic is the only living Semitic language that preserved the complete Proto-Semitic grammatical cases and declension (ʾIʿrab). In some dialects of Northern and Central Saudi Arabia, one encounters the nunation in the -in form, e.g. دَرْبٍ , "a road" (as in دَرْبٍ طويل vs. the common colloquial دَرْبْ طويل ), apparently with the -i- of the former genitive, while -u < -un is preserved in some Yemenite colloquials when the noun is indeterminate (e.g. بَيْتُ , "a house", but al-bayt, "the house").
Australian Aboriginal languages
Australian languages represent a diversity of case paradigms in terms of their alignment (i.e. nominative-accusative vs. ergative-absolutive) and the morpho-syntactic properties of case inflection including where/how many times across a noun phrase the case morphology will appear. For typical r-expression noun phrases, most Australian languages follow a basic ERG-ABS template with additional cases for peripheral arguments; however, many Australian languages, the function of case marking extends beyond the prototypical function of specifying the syntactic and semantic relation of an NP to a predicate. use a five-part system for categorizing the functional roles of case marking in Australian languages. They are enumerated below as they appear in :
Wanyjirra is an example of a language in which case marking occurs on all sub-constituents of the NP; see the following example in which the demonstrative, head, and quantifier of the noun phrase all receive ergative marking:
Basque
Basque language has the following cases, with examples given in the indefinite, definite singular, definite plural, and definite close plural of the word etxe, "house", "home":
German
In German language, grammatical case is largely preserved in the articles and adjectives, but nouns have lost many of their original endings. Below is an example of case inflection in German using the masculine and one of the German words for "sailor".
Hindi-Urdu
Hindi-Urdu (Hindustani) has three noun cases, the nominative, oblique, and vocative cases. The vocative case is now obsolete (but still used in certain regions) and the oblique case doubles as the vocative case. The pronoun cases in Hindi-Urdu are the nominative, ergative, accusative, dative, and two oblique cases. The case forms which do not exist for certain pronouns are constructed using primary postpositions (or other grammatical particles) and the oblique case (shown in parentheses in the table below).
(2025). 9781402027178 ISBN 9781402027178
|valign="top"|
{ class="wikitable"
! colspan="2" rowspan="2" Noun
cases
! colspan="2"Masculine
! colspan="2" Feminine Singular Nominative case लड़का
lar̥kā पेड़
per̥ लड़की
lar̥kī माता
mātā Oblique case लड़के
lar̥ke Vocative case Plural Nominative case लड़कियाँ
lar̥kiyã माताएँ
mātaẽ Oblique case लड़कों
lar̥kõ पेड़ों
per̥õ लड़कियों
lar̥kiyõ माताओं
mātāõ Vocative case माताओ
mātāo
|
Nominative case मैं
ma͠i हम
ham तू
tū तुम
tum आप
āp Ergative case मैंने
ma͠ine हमने
hamne तूने
tūne तुमने
tumne आपने
āpne Accusative case मुझे
mujhe हमें
hamẽ तुझे
tujhe तुम्हें
tumhẽ (आपको)
āpko Dative case Oblique case मुझ
mujh हम
ham तुझ
tujh तुम
tum आप
āp Oblique case
(emphasised)मुझी
mujhī हमीं
hamī̃ तुझी
tujhī तुम्हीं
tumhī̃ (आप ही)
āp hī
|-
| colspan="3" | 1 कौन (kaun) is the animate interrogative pronoun and क्या (kyā) is the inanimate interrogative pronoun.
|-
| colspan="3" | Note: Hindi lacks 3rd person personal pronouns and to compensate the demonstrative pronouns are used as 3rd person personal pronouns.
|}
Nominative case
(colloquial)ये
ye वो
जो
jo कौन, क्या 1
kaun, kyā Nominative case
(literary)यह
yah ये
ye वह
vah वे
ve Ergative case इसने
isne इन्होंने
inhõne उसने
usne उन्होंने
unhõne जिसने
jisne जिन्होंने
jinhõne किसने
kisne किन्होंने
kinhõne Accusative case इसे
ise इन्हें
inhẽ उसे
use उन्हें
unhẽ जिसे
jise जिन्हें
jinhẽ किसे
kise किन्हें
kinhẽ Dative case Oblique case इस
is इन
in उस
us उन
un जिस
jis जिन
jin किस
kis किन
kin Oblique case
(emphasised)इसी
isī इन्हीं
inhī̃ उसी
usī उन्हीं
unhī̃ (जिस भी)
jis bhī (जिन भी)
jin bhī किसी
kisī किन्हीं
kinhī̃
Latin
An example of a Latin case inflection is given below, using the singular forms of the Latin term for "cook", which belongs to .
Lithuanian
Typically in Lithuanian, only the inflection changes for the seven different grammatical cases:
Hungarian
Hungarian declension is relatively simple with regular suffixes attached to the vast majority of nouns. The following table lists all of the cases used in Hungarian.
+ – house, – two Nominative case subject ház house (as a subject) Accusative case direct object -ot/(-at)/-et/-öt/-t házat house (as an object) Dative case indirect object -nak/-nek háznak to the house Genitive case possession házé of the house (belonging to) Instrumental-comitative case with -val/-vel (Assim.) házzal with the house Causal-final case for, for the purpose of -ért házért for the house Translative case into (used to show transformation) -vá/-vé (Assim.) házzá turn into a house Terminative case as far as, up to -ig házig as far as the house Illative case into (location) -ba/-be házba into the house Adessive case at háznál at the house Ablative case from (away from) háztól (away) from the house Elative case from (out of) házból from the inside of the house Sublative case onto (movement towards a thing) házra onto the house Superessive case on/upon (static position) házon on top of the house Delative case from (movement away from a thing) házról from on top of the house, about the house Temporal case at (used to indicate time or moment) kettőkor at two (o'clock) Sociative case with (archaic) -stul/-stül házastul with the house Locative case in házban in the house, inside the house Types of types or variants of a thing kettőféle ház two types of houses
Russian
An example of a Russian language case inflection is given below (with explicit stress marks), using the singular forms of the Russian term for "sailor", which belongs to Russian's first declension class.
Sanskrit
Grammatical case was analyzed extensively in Sanskrit. The grammarian Pāṇini identified six semantic Theta role or kāraka,Pieter Cornelis Verhagen, Handbook of oriental studies: India. A history of Sanskrit grammatical literature in Tibet, Volume 2, BRILL, 2001, , p. 281. which are related to the following eight Sanskrit cases in order:
|-
| ¹ Vedic
|}
For example, in the following sentence leaf is the agent ( kartā, nominative case), tree is the source ( apādāna, ablative case), and ground is the locus ( adhikaraṇa, locative case). The declensions are reflected in the morphemes -āt, -am, and -au respectively.
{ class="wikitable"
Kartṛ
कर्तृ nominative case वृक्षः
वृक्षौ
vṛkṣau वृक्षाः / वृक्षासः¹
vṛkṣāḥ / vṛkṣāsaḥ¹ Sambodhana
सम्बोधन Vocative case वृक्ष
Karma
कर्म Accusative case वृक्षम्
vṛkṣam वृक्षान्
vṛkṣān Karaṇa
करण Instrumental वृक्षेण
वृक्षाभ्याम्
वृक्षैः / वृक्षेभिः¹
vṛkṣaiḥ / vṛkṣebhiḥ¹ Sampradāna
सम्प्रदान Dative case वृक्षाय
vṛkṣāya वृक्षेभ्यः
vṛkṣebhyaḥ Apādāna
अपादान Ablative case वृक्षात्
vṛkṣāt Sambandha
सम्बन्ध Genitive case वृक्षस्य
vṛkṣasya वृक्षयोः
vṛkṣayoḥ वृक्षाणाम्
vṛkṣāṇām Adhikaraṇa
अधिकरण Locative case वृक्षे
vṛkṣe वृक्षेषु
vṛkṣeṣu
Tamil
The Tamil language case system is analyzed in native and missionary grammars as consisting of a finite number of cases. The usual treatment of Tamil case (Arden 1942)Arden, A.H. 1942, repr. 1969. A Progressive Grammar of the Tamil Language. Madras: Christian Literature Society. is one in which there are seven cases: nominative (first case), accusative (second case), instrumental (third), dative (fourth), ablative (fifth), genitive (sixth), and locative (seventh). In traditional analyses, there is always a clear distinction made between post-positional morphemes and case endings. The vocative is sometimes given a place in the case system as an eighth case, but vocative forms do not participate in usual morphophonemic alternations and do not govern the use of any postpositions. Modern grammarians, however, argue that this eight-case classification is coarse and artificial and that Tamil usage is best understood if each suffix or combination of suffixes is seen as marking a separate case.
—
Turkish
Modern Turkish has six cases (In Turkish İsmin Hâlleri).
Evolution
As languages evolve, case systems change. In early Ancient Greek, for example, the genitive and ablative cases of given names became combined, giving five cases, rather than the six retained in Latin. In modern Hindi, the cases have been reduced to three: a direct case (for subjects and direct objects) and oblique case, and a vocative case. In English, apart from the pronouns discussed above, case has vanished altogether except for the possessive/non-possessive dichotomy in nouns.
Linguistic typology
Morphosyntactic alignment
Languages are categorized into several case systems, based on their morphosyntactic alignment—how they group verb agents and patients into cases:
Language families
See also
Notes
General references
External links
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