12. The case subcategorization of English nouns.

Case is the morphological category of the noun manifested in the forms of noun declension and showing the relations of the nounal referent to other objects and phenomena.

The category of case in English constitutes a great linguistic problem. Linguists argue, first, whether the category of case really exists in modern English, and, second, if it does exist, how many case forms of the noun can be distinguished in English. The main disagreements concern the grammatical status of “noun + an apostrophe + –s” form (Ted’s book, the chairman’s decision) rendering the same meaning of appurtenance as the unfeatured form of the noun in a prepositional construction, cf.: the chairman’s decision – the decision of the chairman.

The following four approaches, advanced at various times by different scholars, can be distinguished in the analysis of this problem.

1)The approach which can be defined as “the theory of positional cases” was developed by J. C. Nesfield, M. Deutchbein, M. Bryant and other linguists, mainly in English-speaking countries. They follow the patterns of classical Latin grammar, distinguishing nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and vocative cases in English. Since there are no special morphological marks to distinguish these cases in English (except for the genitive) like in Latin or other inflectional languages, the cases are differentiated by the functional position of the noun in the sentence, e.g.: the nominative case corresponds with the subject, the accusative case with the direct object, the dative case with indirect object, and the vocative case with the address. Thus, “the theory of positional cases” presents an obvious confusion of the formal, morphological characteristics of the noun and its functional, syntactic features. The comparative analysis of the noun in English and in Latin within “the theory of positional cases” approach can be used to show that the grammatical meanings expressed by case forms in inflectional languages (“noun-declensional” languages) are regularly expressed in English by other means, in particular by syntactic positions, or word-order.

2)The approach which can be defined as “the theory of prepositional cases” supplements the previous one and follows the same route of Latin-oriented, old school grammar traditions. The linguists who formulated it, G. Curme among them, treat the combinations of nouns with prepositions as specific analytical case forms, e.g.: the dative case is expressed by nouns with the prepositions ‘to’ and ‘for’, the genitive case by nouns with the preposition ‘of’, the instrumental case by nouns with the preposition ‘with’, e.g.: for the girl, of the girl, with a key. They see the system of cases in English as comprising the regular inflectional case (the genitive), “positional cases”, and “prepositional cases”. This approach is not recognized by mainstream linguistics, because, again, syntactical and morphological characteristics of the noun are confused. Besides, as B. Ilyish noted, if we are consistent in applying this theory, each prepositional phrase should be considered as a separate case form and their number will be almost infinite.

3)The approach which can be defined as “the theory of limited case” is the most widely accepted theory of case in English today. It was formulated by linguists H. Sweet, O. Jespersen and further developed by Russian linguists A. Smirnitsky, L. Barchudarov and others. It is based on the oppositional presentation of the category; the category of case is expressed by the opposition of two forms: the first form, “the genitive case”, is the strong, featured member of the opposition, marked by the postpositional element ‘–s’ after an apostrophe in the singular and just an apostrophe in the plural, e.g.: the girl’s books, the girls’ books; the second, unfeatured form is the weak member of the opposition and is usually referred to as “the common case” (“non-genitive”). The category of case is realized in full in animate nouns and restrictedly in inanimate nouns in English, hence the name – “the theory of limited case”. Besides being semantically (lexically) limited, the category of case in English is limited syntactically, as the genitive case form of the noun is used only as an attribute, and it is also positionally limited: it is used predominantly in preposition to the word it modifies (except for some contexts, known as “double genitive”, e.g.: this idea of Tom’s).

4)The approach which can be defined as “the theory of the possessive postposition”, or “the theory of no case” states that the category of case which did exist in Old English was completely lost by the noun in the course of its historical development. The proponents of this theory, G. N. Vorontsova, A. M. Mukhin among them, maintain that what is traditionally treated as the inflectional genitive case form is actually a combination of the noun with a postposition denoting possession. The main arguments to support this point of view are as follows: first, the postpositional element ‘s is not only used with words, but also with the units larger than the word, with word-combinations and even sentences, e.g.: his daughter Mary’s arrival, the man I saw yesterday’s face; it may be used with no noun at all, but with a pronoun, e.g.: somebody else’s car; second, the same meaning of possession is rendered in English by prepositional of-phrases, e.g.: this man’s daughter – the daughter of this man. The followers of this approach conclude that –s is no longer an inflection, but a particle-like postpositional word, so, “noun +–‘s” is not a morphological form of the noun, but a purely syntactical construction and there is no longer a morphological category of case in English. One of the additional arguments is as follows: the genitive case of the noun in the plural is practically undistinguishable by ear from its common case form, and it is homonymous with the genitive case of the noun in the singular, cf.: boy’s, boys, boys’.

The advocates of “the possessive postpositive theory” have managed to specify the peculiarities of the genitive in English which make it different from regular case forms in inflectional languages; still, there are certain counter-arguments that show the existence of the case category in English. First, cases when the possessive postpositive –‘s is added to units larger than the word are very few in comparison to cases where it is added to the noun (some estimates show the correlation as 4% to 96% respectively), besides, these cases are often stylistically marked and most of them make intermediary phenomena between a word and a word-combination, e.g.: what-his-name’s hat; the same applies to the use of the genitive marker –‘s with certain pronouns. Second, the possessive postpositive differs from regular particles: regular postpositional particles usually correspond with prepositions (to give up – up the hill), which is not the case with –‘s; the combinations of words with postpositional particles are usually lexicalized and recorded in dictionaries, while – ‘s is grammatically bound to the use of the noun and their combinations are never recorded as separate lexical units; –‘s is phonetically close to regular morphemes, as it has the same variants distinguished in complementary distributions as the grammatical suffix –s: [-s], [-z], [-iz]; thus, actually the status of –‘s is intermediary between a particle and a morpheme. As for the semantic parallelism between possessive postpositional constructions and prepositional of-phrases, there are definite semantic differences between them in most contexts: as has been mentioned, genitive case forms are predominantly used with animate nouns, while of-phrases are used with inanimate nouns; in addition, when used in textual co-occurrence with of-phrases, the noun in the genitive usually denotes the doer of the action, while the noun after the preposition ‘of’ denotes the object, cf.: the country’s choice of the President, the President’s choice of the country; there are other subtle semantic peculiarities. The last-mentioned argument of the “no case theory” can be refuted too: though phonetically the genitive of the plural is indistinguishable from its common case counterpart and the genitive of the singular, these three forms are clearly marked in writing, and besides, there are irregular forms of the plural, which make the genitive an unmistakably separate form, e.g.: children – children’s.

The solution to the problem of the category of case in English can be formulated on the basis of the two theories, “the theory of limited case” and “the theory of the possessive postpositive”, critically revised and combined. There is no doubt that the inflectional case of the noun in English has ceased to exist. The particle nature of –‘s is evident, since it can be added to units larger than the word, but this does not prove the absence of the category of case: it is a specific particle expression of case which can be likened to the particle expression of the category of mood in Russian, cf.: Я бы пошел с тобой. A new, peculiar category of case has developed in modern English: it is realized by the paradigmatic opposition of the unmarked “direct”, or “common” case form and the only “oblique” case form: the genitive marked by the possessive postpositional particle. Two subtypes of the genitive are to be recognized: the word genitive (the principal type) and the phrase genitive (the minor type). Since similar meanings can be rendered in English by prepositional constructions, the genitive may be regarded as subsidiary to the syntactic system of prepositional phrases; still, the semantic differences between them and their complementary uses sustain the preservation of the particle genitive in the systemic expression of nounal relations in English.

Within the general semantics of appurtenance, the following semantic subtypes of the genitive can be distinguished:

1. the genitive of possessor (of inorganic possession), e.g.: Tom’s toy; this type of meaning can be explicitly demonstrated by a special transformational diagnostic test: Tom’s toy à the toy belongs to Tom;

2. the genitive of the whole (of organic possession), e.g.: Tom’s hand à the hand is a part of Tom; as a subtype the genitive of received qualification can be distinguished, e.g.: Tom’s vanity à vanity is the peculiar feature of Tom;

3. the genitive of agent, or subject of action, e.g.: Tom’s actions à Tom acts; the minor subtype of this is the genitive of author, e.g.: Dickens’s novels à the novels written by Dickens;

4. the genitive of patient, or object of action, e.g.: the hostages’ release à the hostages were released;

5. the genitive of destination, e.g.: women’s underwear à underwear for women;

6. the genitive of qualification, e.g.: a girl’s voice à the voice characteristic of a girl, peculiar to a girl; subtype – the genitive of comparison, e.g.: a cock’s self-confidence à self-confidence like that of a cock, resembling the self-confidence of a cock;

7. the adverbial genitive (usually of place and time modification), e.g.: yesterday’s talks à the talks that took place yesterday;

8. the genitive of quantity, e.g.: a three miles’ distance from here.

As a separate type of genitive the so-called “absolute genitive” is distinguished, when the noun in the genitive case is used independently, not as an attribute of another noun, e.g.: at the baker’s, at Tom’s. These are the cases of lexicalized ellipses in word-combinations: at the baker’s shop, at Tom’s place.

The given semantic description of the genitive is not exhaustive; there may be further subdivisions and generalizations. Sometimes all the semantic types of the genitive are united into two large groups: those denoting possession and those denoting qualification. This subdivision is grammatically relevant, because in the first case the articles and attributes modify the noun in the genitive case itself, e.g.: the young man’s son, Byron’s last poem, while in the second case they modify the noun which follows the one in the genitive case, e.g.: a pleasant five minutes’ walk.

As is clear from the description given, the genitive does not always denote “possession”; that is why the term “genitive” is more accurate than the term “possessive”, though both of them are widely used in linguistics.

The category of case of nouns is traditionally treated in correlation with the case of personal pronouns, which substitute for nouns. The following four case forms of personal pronouns are traditionally recognized: the nominative case (I, we, you, he, etc.), the objective case (me, us, you, him, etc.); to these the possessive pronouns are added in two forms: the conjoint form (my, our, your, his, etc.) and the absolute form (mine, ours, yours, his, etc.). The more advanced approach states that these forms no longer constitute the case forms of pronouns, because, first, they are incompatible with the system of nounal cases (the common case vs. the genitive case), and, second, they are no longer members of any productive declensional models (forms of the same pronouns) but rather individual groups of words, united in a lexical paradigmatic series, e.g.: I – me – my – mine, we – us – our – ours, etc. The pronounal declension system has completely disintegrated along with the inflectional declensional system of the nounal case.

There were attempts in the history of linguistics to use the correlation of the pronounal case system and the nounal case system to prove the existence or the absence of the category of case of nouns. But neither the acceptance of the pronounal case nor its rejection can prove the existence or the absence of the nounal case category: the category of case of nouns cannot be treated as depending upon the case system of pronouns, since pronouns substitute for nouns, reflecting their categories, and not vice versa.