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Case is a grammatical category determined by the syntactic or semantic function of a noun or pronoun.

  In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun indicates its grammatical function in a greater phrase or clause; such as the role of subject, of direct object, or of possessor. While most languages distinguish cases in some fashion, it is only customary to say that a language has cases when these are codified in the morphology of its nouns — that is, when nouns change their form to reflect their case. (Such a change in form is a kind of declension)

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Cases are related to, but distinct from, thematic roles such as agent and patient; while certain cases in each language tend to correspond to certain thematic roles, cases are a syntactic notion whereas thematic roles are a semantic one.

Example: The Latin sentences: Canis hominem mordet ‘Dog bites man’ and Canem homo mordet ‘Man bites dog’, illustrate that differing case endings express the differing functions of the nouns in Latin. 

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Cases in EnglishCases are not very prominent in modern

English, except in its personal pronouns (a remnant of the more extensive case system of Old English). For other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, case is indicated only by word order, by prepositions, and by the clitic -'s.

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English personal pronouns are typically said to have three morphological cases: the nominative case (such subjective pronouns as I, he, she, we), used for the subject of a finite verb and sometimes for the complement of a copula; the accusative/dative case (such objective pronouns as me, him, her, us), used for the direct or indirect object of a verb, for the object of a preposition, and sometimes for the complement of a copula; and the genitive case (such possessive pronouns as my/mine, his, her(s), our(s)), used for a grammatical possessor.

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A finite verb is a verb that is inflected for person and for tense according to the rules and categories of the languages in which it occurs. Finite verbs can form independent clauses, which can stand by their own as complete sentences.

The finite forms of a verb are the forms where the verb shows tense, person or singular plural. Non-finite verb forms have no person, tense or number.

I go, she goes, he went - These verb forms are finite.

To go, going, gone - These verb forms are non-finite.

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The eight historic cases are as follows, with examples:

The nominative case, which corresponds to English's subjective case, indicates the subject of a finite verb:

We went to the store. The accusative case, which together with the

dative and ablative cases (below) corresponds to English's objective case, indicates the direct object of a verb:

The clerk remembered us. The dative case indicates the indirect object of a

verb: The clerk gave us a discount.

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The ablative case indicates the object of most common prepositions:

The victim went with us to see the doctor. The genitive case, which corresponds to

English's possessive case, indicates the possessor of another noun:

Our citizens are proud of our country. The vocative case indicates an addressee: You there, are you O.K.? The locative case indicates a location: We live in China. The instrumental case indicates an object used

in performing an action: We wiped the floor with it.

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Verb valency or valence refers to the number of arguments controlled by a verbal predicate. It is related, though not identical, to verb transitivity, which counts only object arguments of the verbal predicate. Verb valency, on the other hand, includes all arguments, including the subject of the verb.

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Types of valency1. An avalent verb takes no arguments, e.g.

It rains. (Though it is technically the subject of the verb, it is only a dummy subject, that is a syntactic placeholder with no true meaning.)

2. A monovalent verb takes one argument, e.g. He sleeps.

3. A divalent verb takes two, e.g. He kicks the ball.

4. A trivalent verb takes three, e.g. He gives her a flower.

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The verb requires all of these arguments in a well-formed sentence, although they can sometimes undergo valency reduction or expansion.

For instance, to eat is naturally divalent, as in he eats an apple, but may be reduced to monovalency in he eats. This is called valency reduction.

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Verbs that are usually monovalent, like to sleep, cannot take a direct object. However, there are cases where the valency of such verbs can be expanded, for instance in He sleeps the sleep of death. This is called valency expansion.

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transitivity is a property of verbs that relates to whether a verb can take direct objects. It is closely related to valency.

Traditional grammar makes a binary distinction between transitive verbs such as throw, injure, kiss that take a direct object, versus intransitive verbs such as fall or sit that cannot take a direct object.

In practice, many languages, such as English intepret the category more flexibly; allowing, for example, ambitransitive verbs or ditransitive verbs.

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An ambitransitive verb is a verb that can be used both as intransitive or as transitive without requiring a morphological change. That is, the same verb form may or may not require a direct object.

English has a large number of ambitransitive verbs; examples include read, break, eat, follow, read, win .

and understand (e.g. "I read the book," "I read all afternoon").

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Eat and read and many other verbs can be used either transitively or intransitively. Often there is a semantic difference between the intransitive and transitive forms of a verb: the water is boiling versus I boiled the water; the grapes grew versus I grew the grapes. In these examples, the role of the subject differs between intransitive and transitive verbs.

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Universal Grammar allows case, just like tense, to be expressed either synthetically (as suffixes on nouns) or analytically (by means of prepositions or other syntactic heads that take an entire noun phrase as their argument). As we will see, English allows both ways of expressing case (just as it allows both ways of expressing tense in watch-ed and will watch). It is possible to describe both expressions of case in a unitary way by treating case as a feature on a noun phrase that is checked by a head. As we will show, case checking is subject to structural as well as nonstructural licensing conditions.

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The basic purpose of caseIn order to understand the purpose

of case in human language, it is useful to consider languages in which constituent order is not as fixed as it is in English. In German, for instance, unlike English, the subject of an ordinary declarative clause needn't precede the verb, as shown in (1) and (2). In the examples, boldface indicates the subject, and italics indicates the object.

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German1 a.   Der Mann sieht den Hund. the man sees the dog 'The man sees the dog.' 1 b. Den Hund sieht der Mann. the dog sees the man same as (1a), not the same as

(2a)

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2a. Der Hund sieht den Mann. the dog sees the man 'The dog sees the man.' 2b. Den Mann sieht der Hund. the man sees the dog same as (2a), not the same as (1a)

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Since German speakers can't rely on constituent order to identify subjects and objects, how is it possible for them to keep track of which constituent expresses which grammatical relation? The answer is that grammatical relations are encoded in German in terms of morphological case marking.

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(3) a.   d- er Mann, d- er Hund the nom man the nom dog b.   d- en Mann, d- en Hund the acc man the acc dog Notice that in (3), the distinction

between nominative and accusative case is marked once: on the head of the noun phrase (the determiner).

Noun phrases can be case-marked either on the determiner, or on the noun, or redundantly on both.

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(Japanese) In the following sentence, case is indicated

by the case markers ga, ni, and o:John ga Mary ni hon o yatta ‘John gave Mary a book.’

NOMINATIVE John

DATIVE Mary

ACCUSATIVE book

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1. ABESSIVE CASEabessive, caritive and privative are

names for a grammatical case expressing the lack or absence of the marked noun.

In English, the corresponding function is expressed by the preposition without or by the suffix -less.

The name abessive is derived from Latin abesse "to be away/absent," caritive is derived from Latin carere "to lack", privative is derived from Latin privare "to deprive."

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In the Finnish language, the abessive case is marked by -tta for back vowels and -ttä for front vowels according to vowel harmony. For example: raha "money" rahatta "without money“

Estonian also uses the abessive, which is marked by -ta in both the singular and the plural: autota "without a car”

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2. ACCUSATIVE CASEaccusative case of a noun is the

grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of (some or all) prepositions.

Modern English, which almost entirely lacks declension in its nouns, still has an explicitly marked accusative case in a few pronouns as a remnant of Old English, an earlier declined form of the language.

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"Whom" is the accusative case of "who"; "him" is the accusative case of "he"; and "her" is the accusative case of "she". These words also serve as the dative case pronouns in English and could arguably be classified in the oblique case instead.

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In the sentence I see the car, the noun phrase the car is the direct object of the verb "see". In English, which has mostly lost the case system, the definite article and noun — "the car" — remain in the same form regardless of the grammatical role played by the words. One can correctly use "the car" as the subject of a sentence also: "The car is parked here."

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In a declined language, the morphology of the article or noun changes in some way according to the grammatical role played by the noun in a given sentence. For example, in German, one possible translation of "the car" is der Wagen. This is the form in nominative case, used for the subject of a sentence. If this article/noun pair is used as the object of a verb, it (usually) changes to the accusative case, which entails an article shift in German — Ich sehe den Wagen.

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In German, masculine nouns change their definite article from der to den in accusative case.

The accusative case is used for the direct object in a sentence. The masculine forms for German articles, e.g. 'the', 'a', 'my', etc. change in the accusative case: they always end in -en. The feminine, neuter and plural forms don't change. Some German pronouns also change in the accusative case.

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3. ADESSIVE CASE the adessive case is one of the locative cases

with the basic meaning of "on". It is also used as an instrumental case in Finnish.

4. ALLATIVE CASE Allative case from Latin afferre "to bring to") is

a type of the locative cases used in several languages.

In the Finnish language, the allative has the basic meaning of "onto". Its ending is -lle, for example pöytä (table) and pöydälle (onto the top of the table).

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5. INESSIVE CASE a locative grammatical case that carries the

basic meaning of "in": for example, "in the house" is "talo·ssa" in Finnish, "maja·s" in Estonian, "etxea·n" in Basque, "nam·e" in Lithuanian and "ház·ban" in Hungarian.

In Finnish the inessive case is typically formed by adding "ssa/ssä". Estonian adds "s" to the genitive stem. In Hungarian, the suffix "ban/ben" is most commonly used for inessive case, although many others, such as -on, -en, -ön and others are also used, especially with cities.

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6. ELATIVE CASE from Latin efferre "to bring or carry out" is a

locative case with the basic meaning "out of". In Finnish elative is typically formed by adding

"sta/stä", in Estonian by adding "st" to the genitive stem. In Hungarian the suffix "ból/ből" is used for elative.

"talosta" - "out of the house, from house" (Finnish "talo" = "house")"majast" - "out of the house, from house" (Estonian "maja" = "house")"házból" - "out of house" (Hungarian "haz" = "house")

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7. ILLATIVE CASE

from Latin illatus "brought in” has the basic meaning of "into (the inside of)".

An example from Hungarian would be "a házba" (into the house).

An example from Estonian would be "majasse" and "majja" (into the house), formed from "maja" (a house).

An example from Finnish would be "taloon" (into the house), formed from "talo" (a house).

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8. ANTESSIVE is used for marking before something ("before the concert"). The case is found in some Dravidian languages

9. APUDESSIVE CASE is used for marking location next to something ("next to the house"). The case is found in Tsez language.

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10. BENEFACTIVE CASE is a case used where English would use "for", "for the benefit of", or "intended for", e.g. "She opened the door for Tom" or "This book is for Bob".

This meaning is often incorporated in a dative case.

An example of a language with a benefactive case is Basque, which has a benefactive case ending in -entzat. Quechua is another example, and the benefactive case ending in Quechua is -paq.

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11. CAUSAL or CAUSATIVE CASE is a grammatical case that indicates that the marked noun is the cause or reason for something.

This case in Hungarian language combines the Causal case and the Final case: it can express the cause of emotions or the goal of actions (e.g. for bread).

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12. COMITATIVE CASE denotes companionship, and is used

where English would use "in company with" or "together with".

In the Estonian language singular comitative is formed by adding the suffix '-ga' to the genitive in case of singular:

nina (nominative: nose) -> nina (genitive: of nose) -> ninaga (comitative: with a nose)

koer (nominative: dog) -> koera (genitive: of dog) -> koeraga (comitative: with a dog)

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13. DATIVE CASE a grammatical case generally used to

indicate the noun to whom something is given.

The thing being given may be a tangible object, such as "a book" or "a pen", or it may be an intangible abstraction, such as "an answer" or "help". The dative generally marks the indirect object of a verb.

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14. DISTRIBUTIVE CASE specifies how often something is done, as in

regular maintenance or expresses how often something happens (eg. monthly, daily)

"I clean daily", implying that there's no day without cleaning.

15. DISTRIBUTIVE-TEMPORAL CASE specifies when something is done "I clean by day", implying the cleaning is done in

the daytime.

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16. ESSIVE or SIMILARES CASE carries the meaning of a temporary state

of being, often equivalent to the English "as a...".

In the Finnish language, this case is marked by adding "-na/-nä" to the stem of the noun.

Example: lapsi "child" -> lapsena "as a child", "when (I) was a child".

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18. GENITIVE CASE In grammar, the genitive case (or possessive

case) marks a noun as being the possessor of another noun. The genitive case typically has other uses as well, which can vary from language to language: it can typically indicate various relationships other than possession.

Modern English does not typically mark nouns for a genitive case — rather, it uses the clitic 's or a preposition (usually of) — but the personal pronouns do have distinct possessive forms.

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Depending on the language, specific varieties of genitive-noun–main-noun relationships may include:

possession (Possessive case): inalienable possession ("Janet's height", "Janet's

existence", "Janet's long fingers") alienable possession ("Janet's jacket", "Janet's drink") relationship indicated by the noun being modified

("Janet's husband")

composition ( Partitive case): substance ("a wheel of cheese") elements ("a group of men") source ("a portion of the food")

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19. INSTRUCTIVE CASE has the basic meaning of "by means of". In Turkish, the suffix -le is used for this

purpose. Ex: Trenle geldim "I came via train".

20.INSTRUMENTAL CASE a grammatical case used to indicate that

a noun is the instrument or means by or with which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action. The noun may be either a physical object or an abstract concept.

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English, lacking an instrumental case, might use a preposition (usually with) to express the same meaning: I wrote the note with/by means of a pen.

Though the instrumental case does not exist in many languages, some languages use other cases to denote the means, or instrument, of an action.

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Hungarian language contains the Instrumental case and the Comitative case at the same time. It is similar to the English preposition with. It may refer to the means of the action (with a knife, fork; by tram etc.) and to the person in whose company the action is carried out (with his family etc).

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21. MODAL CASE a grammatical case used to express

ability, intention, necessity, obligation, permission, possibility, etc. It takes the place of English modal verbs such as can, could, would, might, may.

22. MULTIPLICATIVE CASE is used for marking a number of something ("three times"). The case is found in Hungarian language.

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23. NOMINATIVE CASE a grammatical case for a noun, which generally

marks the subject of a verb, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments.

English still retains some nominative pronouns, as opposed to the accusative case or oblique case: I (accusative, me), we (accusative, us), he (accusative, him), she (accusative, her) and they (accusative, them). An archaic usage is the singular second-person pronoun thou (accusative thee). A special case is the word you: Originally ye was its nominative form and you the accusative, but over time you has come to be used for the nominative as well.

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24. PROXIMATIVE CASEis used to describe a meaning similar to

that of the English preposition "near to" or "close to".

25. TERMINATIVE CASE indicates to what point; where something ends. These examples are from Estonian, wherein it is indicated by the '-ni' suffix:

jõeni: "to the river" / "as far as the river" kella kuueni: "until six o'clock"

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26. VOCATIVE CASEIs used for a noun identifying the person

(animal, object, etc.) being addressed and/or occasionally the determiners of that noun. A vocative expression is an expression of direct address, wherein the identity of the party being spoken to is set forth expressly within a sentence. For example, in the sentence, "I don't know, John," John is a vocative expression indicating the party who is being addressed.

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27. Partitive caserefers to the selection of a part or quantity

out of a group or amount. a grammatical case which denotes

"partialness", "without result", or "without specific identity".

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