Cases: General

Nouns and pronouns play various roles in clauses, and their particular function in a given
sentence is known as their case. Grammatical cases are in many languages associated with a
particular ending or inflection. English nouns show it for the genitive or possessive, with the
apostrophe ‘s,’ as in : cat’s breakfast, today’s program. English pronouns adjust their forms for
the accusative as well as the genitive:
nominative I he she we they who
accusative me him her us them whom
genitive my his her our their whose
Yet the nominative/accusative distinction for English pronouns is increasingly neutralized in
certain contexts (see for example me, and whom)—which suggests evolution towards a
‘common case’ (Wales, 1996). Case distinctions are much more visible in languages such as
German, with its separate accusative and dative forms for many nouns. Latin had them for the
ablative and vocative cases as well. (See further under accusative, ablative, dative and
vocative.) Aboriginal languages in Canada and Australia use other cases which are rare in
European languages, such as instrumental, locative and privative (expressing the lack of
something).

Because English nouns lack distinctive inflections for subject and object, traditional grammars
identify their case in terms of their function relative to the verb or other constituents of the clause.
So the subject noun (or noun phrase) is said to be in the nominative (or subjective) case, and the
object noun / noun phrase to be accusative (or objective) in its case. The dative case would be
found in a name or noun phrase that served as an indirect object (see further under dative and
object).

Modern English case grammar has stimulated fresh analysis of the system of cases, in terms of
the so-called arguments of the verb and its valency. It allows [Cambridge Grammar of English,
2002] that verbs may take one or more arguments:
* one argument
(monovalent: subject only;= intransitive) they agreed

* two arguments
(bivalent: subject + direct object; = monotransitive) they thanked him

* three arguments
(trivalent: subject + indirect object + direct object; = ditransitive)
they sent him a fresh proposal

(See further under transitive.) Though the nomenclature varies, this approach helps to explain
the flexible wording of English clauses, and the different roles of the grammatical subject for
active and passive verbs: the active subject is typically the verb’s agent or senser, while the
passive one is the verb’s goal (Halliday, 1994).
Peters, P. The Cambridge Guide to English Usage. 2004.