A brief look at the rationale for grammatical case in English nouns and pronouns.

AN excerpt reproduced in The Star (May 25, p.46) reads: “The cable channel, which has done religious-focused projects since it debuted, was looking for a worthy follow to the 12-hour series America: The Story of Us ...” (my underline). I feel uneasy about two words used, the first being “religious-focused”, which I feel should be “religion-focused”; and the second being “follow”, on which I now focus. The word used here is a verb which suggests a meaning appropriate to the context but which is not grammatically correct. What is called for is a noun. Consider “following”, which is a noun but it does not fit into the sentence. On the other hand, another noun, “follow-up”, fulfils the requirements. Fitting a noun or pronoun into a sentence is what case is about.

Nowadays it is commonly said, and lamented, that many of our present-day schoolchildren cannot string words together to form a proper sentence in English. Many factors go into the proper construction of a sentence, one of which is case (that is, case in the grammatical sense) – which the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (2004) defines thus: “any of the inflected forms of a noun, adjective, or pronoun that express the semantic relation of the word to other words in the sentence.”

The cases in Latin

It is best to illustrate the idea of cases with an example from Latin, namely the noun silva “forest”. Table 1 shows how the said noun is declined and how the different forms arising from the declension are used.

In respect of the different cases, the noun silva “forest” shares the same word-endings (or inflectional suffixes) as other nouns such as nauta (stem naut-) “sailor” and agricola (stem agricol-) “farmer”. They belong to the First Declension. To complicate matters, there are the Second, the Third, the Fourth, and the Fifth Declensions, each encompassing nouns with a different type of stem and with its corresponding set of word-endings.

The cases of nouns in English

A learner may be relieved to know that the use of nouns in English is not as complicated as that in Latin. English does not have five declensions to cover different classes or types of nouns. Also, English has one case less – the ablative “is not relevant to English, where such meanings are expressed by prepositional phrases” (E. Chalker and E. Weiner, 1998. Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar). Inflections are minimal. The plural is formed from the singular simply by the addition of the suffix -s or its variant -es (e.g. bus/buses, boy/boys), except for those nouns which have special plural forms (e.g. ox/oxen, man/men, child/children). The same form is used for all cases, as witness the noun cat (nominative: the cat meows; vocative: hey, cat! come here; accusative: the boy beat the cat; genitive: there is commonly a kink in the tail of a local cat; dative: the lady fed a fish to the cat).

Note that the genitive case, indicated by a prepositional phrase, may alternatively be indicated by the inflectional suffix ’s, i.e. apostrophe s (a kink in the tail of a cat = a kink in the cat’s tail), or by its variant s’, i.e. s apostrophe where the plural ends with an “s” (the children of the Joneses = the Joneses’ children).

The declension of adjectives

Latin adjectives, like nouns, undergo declension. The adjective is declined concurrently with the noun it qualifies, to accord with the noun in every aspect – same gender (nouns, even for inanimate objects, may be masculine, feminine, or neuter; and the adjective must agree with the gender of the noun), same number (e.g. a singular adjective for a singular noun), and same case (e.g. a noun in the accusative calls for the adjective to be in the accusative).

In contrast, English adjectives remain unchanged in all grammatical situations (and, here, the learner of English may heave another sigh of relief). The adjective keeps the same form irrespective of gender (a beautiful ram, a beautiful ewe, a beautiful vase), number (a beautiful puppy, three beautiful puppies), and case (in a beautiful garden, from a beautiful lady).

The declension of personal pronouns

Pronouns are also declined, but here the bother with declension is as bad in Latin as it is in English. Latin nouns form the different cases by tagging on inflectional suffixes but its personal pronouns have irregular forms for the different cases. Likewise the English personal pronouns have irregular forms for case and number, as well as for person and gender.

Errors with personal pronouns

Once in a while one comes across an incorrect use of a personal pronoun. Such mistakes can be easily rectified if one correctly identifies the case (as well as number and person and gender) of the pronoun used in the sentence. The following examples illustrate: (1) Me and my sister attended the concert yesterday. The pronoun “me” should be replaced by “I” for the nominative case; furthermore, the usual construction puts the first person pronoun last, thus: “my sister and I”. (2) I went to see Rani but he was not at home. “Rani” is of the feminine gender, so that the corresponding pronoun in the nominative case should be “she”, not “he”. (3) Ravi and us went to the movies. The sentence has a compound subject made up of “Ravi” and “us”, each of which is in the nominative case. The pronoun “us” should therefore be corrected to the nominative-case “we”. (4) Let you and I sing. The transitive verb “let” governs the compound object “you and I”, either of which should be in the accusative case. The pronoun “I” for the nominative case should be replaced by “me” for the accusative case. (5) Hassan cannot stand you complaining all the time. It appears that Hassan can abide you but not the complaining by you. The pronoun “you” in the accusative case should therefore be corrected to the genitive “your”, qualifying the gerund “complaining”. (6) The prize went to she alone. The pronoun “she” should be in the dative case, being the indirect object of the verb “went”, so that “she” should be amended to the dative “her”. (7) “... I only wish I could be as nonchalant as him about deadlines.” – StarTwo, May 10, p.T9. The phrase “as him” is actually the elliptical version of “as he (is nonchalant)”, so that the accusative “him” should be replaced by the nominative “he”. (8) “I am talking about we citizens using this document as one of our tools in the fight for human rights, rule of law and democracy.” – The Star, Oct 21, 2010, p.N52. The phrase “about we citizens” has the pronoun “we” and the noun “citizens” in apposition; and both, being the object of the preposition “about”, are in the accusative case. The nominative “we” should properly be replaced by the accusative “us”.

Parting shot

I have tried to cover the topic of grammatical case, albeit briefly. Now let I – oops! me – take a breather.

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