Advanced Grammar Topics: Grammatical Cases Part 2

Written by Blackkdark on 30th June 2007

There was a previous article about Grammatical Case. Now, however, I want to go into more detail about some of the heavy factors involved with them. Here I will go over the "universal" four, and then another article will deal with advanced case factors.

There are four conjugations which seem to be "universal" in the sense that they are in most declined languages. These are the 4 of German, Icelandic, and Old English. They are the building blocks to understanding how the whole system works. The four cases are Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, and Dative. Occasionally an English speaker might hear an English teacher (grrrrrr) say something along the lines of Predicate Nominative, but other than that, these words don't usually enter a speaker's vocabulary unless they are learning Latin or another declined language.

The first case is Nominative. This is the dictionary form. This is the most basic form of the noun, but it is not usually the case where this form is the root of the word. This can also be called the Subject or Subjective case. In a sentence like: John runs. John would be in the nominative case. Pronouns such as He, I, We, They, etc, are all Nominative case pronouns. Issues come up when the verb to be is involved, because this verb and some verbs like it, are similar to equal signs (=). This means that nouns on both sides of the to be verb tend to be nominative. It is the nominative of the predicate (another word for verb) so it's predicate nominative. This is the case if a person (not that everyone does do this) answers the phone: "This is he/she." or When someone says, "It is I!" or If I said: John is a Doctor. Both John and Doctor would be nominative because of this rule.

The second case is that of the Accusative. This is what we learn in school as the direct object. It is the ball in a sentence like: John hit the ball. It is the basic object in a sentence. It also can follow prepositions like the Dative.

The next case is the Genitive case. This one is fairly important, yet not usually needed in a sentence. This case covers possession. In English, we use this case still. The standard genitive ending is -'s or -'. In many languages, they cover this with a preposition phrases equal to our of. If we say: John's motorcycle fell. or The motorcycle of John fell. John would be genitive in both cases (even if the second sounds a bit award). Motorcycle is going to be the nominative case here. This case sometimes comes with prepositions, depending on the language.

The last, but not least, of the four key cases is the Dative. This is for all intensive purposes the indirect object. There is a simple test to see if a noun is dative in English. That is to rearrange it so that the noun in question has "to" or sometimes "for" in front of it. If it still means the same thing, then it is likely dative. Take these sentences: David sent John the letter. & David sent the letter to John. In both cases John is dative. Dative also goes with a few prepositions as well, depending on the language. In some cases, the Accusative and Dative merge and you get something people call an "objective" case. This happened in Greek.

Prepositions are interesting. In a few language, such as German and Latin, one preposition can be one case or another depending on the real meaning of the prepositional phrase. So in could mean in or into and have different cases for each one. This is where it gets tricky. You just have to read the rules and practice it.

So here's a little breakdown of the 4 basic cases: