The category of case

In present-day linguistics case is used in two senses: 1) semantic, or logic,

and 2) syntactic.

The semantic case conceptwas developed by C. J. Fillmore in the late

1960s. 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.

The syntactic case conceptdates back to the grammars of Ancient Greece

and Ancient Rome. It is a case whose main role is to indicate a relationship

between constituents. To put it otherwise, its role is to indicate a construction in

syntax. Thus genitive is a case which marks one noun as dependent on another, e.g.

John’s car. The conception of case as a marker of a syntactic relation or a

construction can be found in prescriptive, non-structural descriptive and structural

descriptive grammars. Prescriptivists spoke of the nominative, the dative, the

genitive, the accusative, and the ablative.

H. Sweet’sviews (1925) rest on the syntactic conception of case: case to

him is a syntactic relation that can be realized syntactically or morphologically. He

speaks of inflected and non-inflected cases (the genitive vs. the common case).

Non-inflected cases, according to the scholar, are equivalent to the nominative,

vocative, accusative, and dative of inflected languages.

O. Jespersen(1933) speaks of the genitive and the common case. Some

grammarians (R. W. Pence (1947), H. Whitehall (1965), H. Shaw (1952)) give

three cases in English - nominative, genitive (possessive) and accusative

(objective). This three-case system, based on the analogy of the form of pronouns,

remained extremely popular in the grammars of the 20th century, including some

structural grammars (H. Whitehall). H. Whitehall, however, does not reflect the

general situation in the school of structural grammar: structuralists at large

recognize the existence of two cases - the genitive and the common.

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. Genitive of origin: the boy’s story – the boy told the story,

5. Descriptive Genitive: children’s books – books for children

6. Genitive of measure and partitive genitive: a mile’s distance, a day’s trip

7. Appositive genitive: the city of London.

To avoid confusion with the plural, the marker of the genitive case is

represented in written form with an apostrophe. This fact makes possible

disengagement of –`s form from the noun to which it properly belongs. E.g.: The

man I saw yesterday’s son, where -`s is appended to the whole group (the so-called group genitive). It may even follow a word which normally does not possess such a formant, as in somebody else’s book.

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. (limited case theory) 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;

4. The theory of positional cases.

5. The theory of prepositional cases.

We adhere to the view that English does possess the category of case, which

is represented by the opposition of the two forms - the genitive vs. the nongenitive,

or the common. The marked member of the opposition is the genitive and

the unmarked the common: both members express a relation - the genitive

expresses a specific relation (the relation of possession in the wide meaning of the

word) while the common case expresses a wide range of relations including the

relation of possession, e.g. Kennedy’s house vs. the Kennedy house. While

recognizing the existence of the genitive case, we must say that the English

genitive is not a classical case. Its peculiarities are:

1) the inflection -‘s is but loosely connected with the noun (e.g. the Queen of

England’s daughter; the man I met yesterday’s son);

2) genitive constructions are paralleled by corresponding prepositional

constructions (e.g. Shakespeare’s works vs. the works of Shakespeare);

3) the use of the genitive is mainly limited to nouns denoting living beings;

4) the inflection -‘s is used both in the singular and in the plural (e.g. a boy’s

bicycle vs. the boys’ bicycles), which is not typical of case inflexions.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 5061