The mysterious case of cases

While the title of this article might suggest that I'll be discussing some sort of troubling murder investigation, I assure you that is not the case (there are a lot of puns to be made here so I'll try to restrain myself). Rather, the subject of this article is grammatical case, not the criminal sort.

Before we dive into everything, let's get some terminology squared away. First, according to the Glossary of Linguistic Terms, a case is "a grammatical category determined by the syntactic or semantic function of a noun or pronoun." This might not mean a whole lot now, but it'll make sense later on.

Another term I'd like to introduce is declension. Good ole' Wikipedia states that declension is "the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection."

That last term, inflection, might be unfamiliar, and is the last term I'll introduce before we get started. Back to the Glossary of Linguistic Terms; according to them, inflection is "variation in the form of a word, typically by means of an affix, that expresses a grammatical contrast which is obligatory for the stem’s word class in some given grammatical context." Again, these definitions will become clearer later, especially after using some examples.

All right, keep these definitions in mind as we journey through the fascinating world of the grammatical case.

What are noun cases and declensions?

Formal definitions like the ones I gave above only go so far, so let's dive into what a case actually is. Basically, a case is any modification to a noun, pronoun, adjective, participle, or numeral that marks that word or phrase as having a specific grammatical role in a sentence.

The process of modifying these words is called declension. If you've studied a foreign language before, you've probably encountered the word conjugation in relation to verbs. Conjugation is the process of modifying a verb to agree with the person, number, tense, mood, etc.

One example of verb conjugation in English is the fact that the third person singular conjugation of verbs is often different from the other conjugations ("I run" vs. "he runs").

Declension is similar, in that you're changing the stem of the word for a specific function. The difference is that declension refers to nouns and their modifiers, not verbs.

We have some leftover cases in English from when it was an inflected language (this is the third term I introduced above; a language that has cases is called an inflected language). This is seen mainly in pronouns. For example, let's look at the different forms of the first person singular pronoun (ya know, "I"):

This also applies to some other pronouns, but for the most part, English is not considered an inflected language. Inflected languages apply these concepts to all nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and other such words.

So, as you can see from the above example, cases mark words as having a particular role in a sentence. Depending on if you're using the first person singular pronoun as the subject of the sentence ("I gave him a cookie"), the object ("He gave me a cookie"), or some other function, you have to change the actual pronoun.

This doesn't apply to other nouns or noun phrases in English, but it does in inflected languages. So, if a noun plays a specific role in a sentence, say a direct object, you'd have to modify it accordingly.

In English, we delineate direct objects, subjects, indirect objects, and other ideas using prepositions and word order. In inflected languages, though, oftentimes we can eliminate the need for prepositions and there is more freedom in the word order.

Let's look at some examples of different cases now.

What are some types of cases?

There are a lot of different types of cases out there in various different languages across the world. Many languages share a few different cases, though, so I'll go over the more common ones here.

1. Nominative

The nominative case is the easiest to wrap your head around. It's basically the standard form of a noun, pronoun, etc. and serves as the subject of the sentence. In English, for the first person singular pronoun, this would be "I."

Some other examples include:

• The bear ate a berry.

• Tom and I went to the store.

• You are a reading about cases.

Again, pretty simple.

2. Genitive

These cases all have fancy names, but the concepts should hopefully not be too difficult. The genitive case is basically the possessive case, where we would usually use "of" or "'s" in English.

Depending on the language, the genitive can have various functions. While it usually indicates possession ("the cat's toy" or "the toy of the cat"), the genitive is also required for specific prepositions and constructions. For example, in Russian, the genitive is required when using certain prepositions and after certain verbs.

For the most part, though, across inflected languages with the genitive, it can be described as the possessive case.

3. Dative

The dative case is usually used for indirect objects. An object is the receiver of an action (verb) and an indirect object is a receiver that is not immediately affected. In English, this is usually indicated with words like "to" and "for."

An example is the best way to demonstrate this. Let's take the sentence "Harold gave his girlfriend a bouquet of roses yesterday." In this sentence, we can identify two of the cases we've seen already, assuming we translated this into an inflected language.

Harold, being the subject, would be in the nominative case; he is the one doing the action, "giving a bouquet of roses" to his girlfriend. The genitive pronoun, in this case, is "his." Even in English, an non-inflected language, this pronoun is modified from the nominative "he" to the genitive "his."

So where's the dative? Well, who's the recipient of the action? Directly, the "bouquet of roses" are being given, so you might think that's the object. Remember, though, that the dative is the indirect object, which in this case would be Harold's girlfriend. Thus, "girlfriend" would be in the dative case in an inflected language.

Remember that in English we can often identify an indirect object by the word's "to" or "for." In this case, we don't see either of those words, but we can modify the sentence to say "Harold gave a bouquet of roses to his girlfriend," which now does have the word "to." It's now clearer what/who is the indirect object of this sentence.

4. Accusative

The accusative is one of the more common cases that appear in inflected languages. The accusative is similar to the dative case in that it refers to an object of a sentence, but the accusative refers to the direct object.

Going back to our romantic hero Harold, the "bouquet of roses" is the direct object because the thing that is being directly given is the bouquet. Since many sentences feature a subject doing something to an object, you'll encounter the accusative case often in inflected languages.

5. Ablative

This awkwardly sounding case refers to a host of different grammatical functions and is especially present in Latin. The most basic way to think of the ablative case is the means by which you do something.

For example, if you are going to your friend's house, how are you going? By car? By horse? By the Yellow Brick Road? With your other friend? From your house or from somewhere else?

The ablative is a kind of catch-all of cases in languages like Latin that have only 6 (or 5, or 7, depending on who you ask) cases. In Latin, the nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, and vocative (which is used for directly addressing someone like "Hey, Julius, have you seen Brutus lately?" Julius would be in the vocative) are all well-defined. Anything that doesn't fit into any of these cases (unless there is a special construction with certain prepositions or verbs) probably falls into the ablative.

Which languages uses cases?

So, which languages actually use these and other cases? Well, there's a heck of a lot of languages out there that have some sort of a case system, but I'll only go through some major ones that you've most likely heard of.

You've probably gathered so far that Russian and Latin are two inflected languages. Both languages have six cases each: they both share the nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative while Russian has the instrumental and prepositional and Latin has the ablative and vocative. We've discussed the others above, but I'll note here that the instrumental and prepositional are both used with certain prepositions and verbs.

Other inflected languages in the Indo-European branch include German, Greek, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, and Sanskrit. Inflected languages outside of the Indo-European language family include Finnish, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Tamil, and Telugu.

A lot of these languages share cases like the nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative, often with a prepositional/instrumental/locative case thrown in there as well. Some of these languages, like German, decline only articles and adjectives, while others, like Polish, decline nouns, adjectives, numerals, articles, etc.

The case systems are often what make learning these languages difficult, especially for an English-speaker. For example, Hungarian is notoriously difficult because of it18 cases! A number of these cases aren't super common and there is some overlap in suffixes, but it's still pretty daunting when first learning this language.

Once you understand what a case system is, how to use it, and have the rules memorized, though, inflected languages are fairly straightforward (depending, of course, on the language). The cases allow you more freedom for word order and the role of nouns and their modifiers in a sentence are clear.

So don't be intimidated by cases if you are starting to learn one of these languages. It isn't so bad!

Which languages don't use cases?

If you're too intimidated by the idea of an inflected language and would rather try your hand at a more analytic language (one that uses helper words to indicate grammatical meaning, like English), don't worry! There are plenty of languages that don't feature cases to the degree that the above ones do.

Some major languages that don't have cases include English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese, and Vietnamese. Obviously these languages have their own challenges (English spelling, French pronunciation, Chinese and Vietnamese tones), but a case system is one thing you don't have to worry about.

It is worthwhile to remind yourself, though, that even though these languages aren't typically considered synthetic languages (another name for what I've been calling inflected languages), there are still some remnants of cases.

For example, Latin had cases and since Spanish, French, and Portuguese all developed out of Latin, there are still some traces of inflection. This is seen mainly with pronouns and adjectives. Pronouns have a few cases to indicate subject, direct/indirect object, and possession, like English. Adjectives change their form depending on gender and number.

Beyond this and changing nouns for singular/plural, there isn't much inflection that goes on in these languages.

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I hope this article clarifies any confusion you might have had if you've encountered the idea of cases before. Every language approaches this idea in their own way, but the underlying principle is the same. Simply put, cases denote grammatical function in a sentence.

The idea may seem confusing or too difficult, but when you understand what's really going on with noun declension, you'll realize it isn't that bad. So if you just started learning an inflected language, stick with it! Understanding this idea opens up a world of opportunity for understanding the language you're learning and other inflected languages from around the world.

References

1. “Case.” SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms, 8 June 2016, glossary.sil.org/term/case.

2. “Declension.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2 Mar. 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension.

3. “Grammatical Case.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 29 Mar. 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case.

4. “Inflection.” SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms, 9 June 2016, glossary.sil.org/term/inflection.