The Category of Case

Under the category of case we understand the change of form of a noun to denote its grammatical relations to other parts of communication.

The number of cases varies in different languages { two in English (common and Genitive), 7 (including the Vocative case) in Russian). It depends upon the morphological structure of the language and its development.

In Old English cases corresponded to the syntactical positions of nouns. The Nominative represented a subject or a predicative, the Accusative represented direct object, the Dative stood for a indirect object, the Genitive stood for an attribute, the Vocative denoted a direct address. In the course of time the number of cases got reduced , the inflexions died out, and the relations of nouns to other parts of communication came to be expressed by word order, prepositions and two cases – the Common and the Genitive.

Debated Problems within the Category of Case

To the debated problems within the category of case there refer 1. the existence of this category in English ( Otto Jespersen ridiculed the very idea of case in English as a morphological category, but he recognised it as a logical category); 2. the nature of this category (morphological, syntactical, morphologico-syntactical, logical) The prevalent view is the one that treats case as a morphological category, which is based upon the opposition of two cases: the common case and the genitive case; 3. the number of cases { absence of cases, two cases (the common and the genetive case), many cases. Semantic syntax operates with the notion of deep cases while describing semantic relations within a sentence. Charles Fillmore distinguished a proposition, a predicate and arguments when analysing the semantic structure of a proposition. Arguments perform different semantic roles in the sentence, they are associated with cases. Ch. Fillmore suggests such a set of cases: agentive, objective, locative, instrumental, that of goal, that of patient, that of source, that of result, etc. One and the same argument may express different roles{ The teacher explains the new rule (the agent or the source}). W. Chafe adds the cases of experience and beneficiary( I have seen the world. I have been given flowers); }; 4. the nature of the element –‘s. It is an uncommon inflexion which cannot be likened to possessive inflexions in Slavic languages (печаль расставания, печаль разлуки, крылатый слова звук, лепесток розы - лепесток роз, пара гнедых, etc). In Russian case inflexions are attached to nouns. In English the element -‘s can be attached to all kinds of nouns, numerals, adverbs, adjectives, pronouns, composite words, phrases and even sentences (Tomorrow’s newspaper. He’ll come in an hour or two’s time. Somebody else’s phrase. The blond I was dancing with’s name was something like Alison). All these peculiarities make the scholars (profs. Ilyish, Vorontsova, Palmer, Gleason) consider-‘s to be a postposition or even a form- word, like an auxiliary or a particle, serving to convey the meaning of possession, a sign of syntactical dependence. But most scholars believe -‘s to be a typical case inflexion because it comes from OE genitive case; it expresses relations of a noun to other words; it is phonetically dependent, whereas postpositions are phonetically independent; most often it is attached to nouns. Still it is more peculiar and independent than other English grammatical morphemes.