34. Noun: the category of case.

This grammatical category shows the relation of the noun with other words in the sentence and is expressed by the form of the noun. English nouns have two cases: the Common case and the Possessive case. The Com­mon case has no inflection and its meaning is very general. The Possessive case expresses possession, belonging and is generally used with animate nouns denoting people and animals. But in some cases the noun in the Pos­sessive Case has a purely descriptive character: a man's club, children's toys, a woman's magazine. Nouns denoting inanimate objects are not generally used in the posses­sive case. The "of + noun" phrase is used with them:The Possessive Case is formed in the following ways: 1)by adding the inflection's or just' (the apostrophe) to the stem of the noun in the singular not ending in s. the boy's to 2) by adding only an apostrophe (') to the noun in the plural. The sec­ond s is not used. students'

3) by adding an apostrophe -s if a proper name ends in -s. Little Liz's

4) By adding the inflection –s to the last element of compound noun:

a brother-in-law's virtue.now is a growing tendency use possessive case with inanimate nouns denoting:

1 ) time or distance:a moment's silence

2) seasons, Years, montha summer's morning

3) countries. cities. Towns : England's history

4) the sun.the moon.the earth.the world

sun’s rays

5) name of vessels:ship’s crew

6) ordinary objects:

the river's bed, the ocean's roar

3)If two coordinate nouns (joined by and, but, or), express joint possession, the apostrophe is usually added to the last noun. The whole phrase is called "Group Possessive".

James's father's office

4.There are some cases of the so-called "Absolute Possessive". It is called

"absolute", as it is used absolutely, without the noun, which is not re­peated for the sake of style My son would like to have a bike, like Steve's

Absolute Possessive is used:

1)to express some locality (with local meaning: a house, a shop, a clinic, an auction, etc.)the baker's, the barber's, the hairdresser's, the vet's,

2)with partitive meaning which equals to "one of"

Bess is a friend of my mother's. Is she a client of Ms Morgan's

3) to express some strong emotions (mostly negative ones)How I dislike that new boyfriend of Susan's!

5. The Possessive Case is used in some set expressions which are survivals of Old English Genitive Case which was freely used with all nouns in Old English:

to one's heart's content (delight), at one's wit's end.

Note: When dedication is implied the Possessive Case is not used. The State Tretyakov Gallery.

The category of case

Case expresses the relation of a word to another word in the word-group or sentence (my sister’s coat). The category of case correlates with the objective category of possession. The case category in English is realized through the opposition: The Common Case :: The Possessive Case (sister :: sister’s). However, in modern linguistics the term “genitive case” is used instead of the “possessive case” because the meanings rendered by the “`s” sign are not only those of possession. The scope of meanings rendered by the Genitive Case is the following :

1.Possessive Genitive : Mary’s father – Mary has a father,

2.Subjective Genitive: The doctor’s arrival – The doctor has arrived,

3.Objective Genitive : The man’s release – The man was released,

4.Adverbial Genitive : Two hour’s work – X worked for two hours,

5.Equation Genitive : a mile’s distance – the distance is a mile,

6.Genitive of destination: children’s books – books for children,

7.Mixed Group: yesterday’s paper

There is no universal point of view as to the case system in English. Different scholars stick to a different number of cases.

1.There are two cases. The Common one and The Genitive;

2.There are no cases at all, the form `s is optional because the same relations may be expressed by the ‘of-phrase’: the doctor’s arrival – the arrival of the doctor;

3.There are three cases: the Nominative, the Genitive, the Objective due to the existence of objective pronouns me, him, whom;

Case Grammar.

Ch.Fillmore introduced syntactic-semantic classification of cases. They show relations in the so-called deep structure of the sentence. According to him, verbs may stand to different relations to nouns. There are 6 cases:

1.Agentive Case (A) John opened the door;

2.Instrumental case (I) The key opened the door; John used the key to open the door;

3.Dative Case (D) John believed that he would win (the case of the animate being affected by the state of action identified by the verb);

4.Factitive Case (F) The key was damaged ( the result of the action or state identified by the verb);

5.Locative Case (L) Chicago is windy;

6.Objective case (O) John stole the book.