Case

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Case -- inflectional category, basically of nouns which typically marks their role in relation to other parts of the clause. Matthews (1997)

In Blake (2001:1) the notion is used to mean `a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their heads'. In Polish the relationship is realized through case forms (cf. Blake 2001:18), where a case form is an inflected form of a noun with the nominative taken to be basic, and there is a concord between a noun and an attributive or a predicate adjective. This concord is sensitive to case, number and gender.

Blake (2001:28-9) states that in

`the traditional model for describing case systems ... based on Ancient Greek and Latin ... three factors are prominent:

   (a) There are numerous paradigms (when number is taken into
   account) with different patterns of syncretism (i.e. the paradigms are not
   isomorphic).
   (b) For each case there are a number of functions.
   (c) There is a concord between the head of a noun
   phrase and its dependents.'

As far as (b) is concerned first of all we have to mention that Blake (2001:32-3) distinguishes between grammatical cases and semantic cases. The former are constituted by core (nominative, accusative, ergative) and peripheral (genitive, dative), while the latter consist of local (locative, ablative, etc.) and instrumental, comitative, etc. In the thesis we will be interested in the nominative/accisative and the genitive only.

In a variety of languages in the world with even different number of cases it is difficult to describe what functions or meaning each of the cases might have. The nominative is said to pinpoint a subject within a sentence, which `is a purely syntactic relation characteristically associated with presenting given and topical information... [While] the accusative is the case that encodes the direct object of a verb.' (Blake 2001:132-3) It also most often encodes a semantic role of an affected patient of activity verbs. `The genitive case is often used to encode a complement of a nominalized verb, most often the subject.' (Blake 2001:151).

bibliography:

1) Blake, B. J., 2001. Case, Cambridge: Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics.

2) Matthews, P.H., 1997. Concise Dictionary of Linguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Some cases

Translations

• Danish: fald n, kasus n
• Dutch: naamval c
• Faroese: fall n
• German: Kasus, Fall m
• Swedish: kasus n

• Italian: caso m
• Portuguese: caso m

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