6) Categories of case and article determination of the noun.

Case is the morphological category of the noun manifested in the forms of noun declension and showing the relations of the nounal referent to other objects and phenomena. The category of case in English constitutes a great linguistic problem. Linguists argue, first, whether the category of case really exists in modern English, and, second, if it does exist, how many case forms of the noun can be distinguished in English.

The following four approaches, advanced at various times by different scholars, can be distinguished in the analysis of this problem.

The approach which can be defined as “the theory of positional cases” was developed by J. C. Nesfield, M. Deutchbein, M. “the theory of positional cases” was developed by J. C. Nesfield etc. They distinguished nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and vocative cases in English. Since there are no special morphological marks to distinguish these cases in English, the cases are differentiated by the functional position of the noun in the sentence, e.g.: the nominative case corresponds with the subject, the accusative case with the direct object, the dative case with indirect object, and the vocative case with the address.

“the theory of prepositional cases” The linguists treat the combinations of nouns with prepositions as specific analytical case forms, e.g.: the dative case is expressed by nouns with the prepositions ‘to’ and ‘for’, the genitive case by nouns with the preposition ‘of’, the instrumental case by nouns with the preposition ‘with’, e.g.: for the girl, of the girl, with a key. This approach is not recognized by mainstream linguistics, because syntactical and morphological characteristics of the noun are confused. Besides according to this theory each prepositional phrase should be considered as a separate case form and their number will be almost infinite.

“the theory of limited case” is the most widely accepted theory of case in English today. the category of case is expressed by the opposition of two forms: the first form, “the genitive case”, is the strong, featured member of the opposition, marked by the postpositional element ‘–s’ after an apostrophe in the singular and just an apostrophe in the plural, e.g.: the girl’s books, the girls’ books; the second, unfeatured form is the weak member of the opposition and is usually referred to as “the common case” (“non-genitive”).

“the theory of the possessive postposition”, or “the theory of no case” states that the category of case which did exist in Old English was completely lost by the noun in the course of its historical development. The proponents of this theory state that what is traditionally treated as the genitive case form is actually a combination of the noun with a postposition denoting possession. The main arguments to support this: first, the postpositional element ‘s is not only used with words, but also with word-combinations and even sentences, e.g. the man I saw yesterday’s face; it may be used with a pronoun, e.g.: somebody else’s car; second, the same meaning of possession is rendered in English by prepositional of-phrases, e.g.: this man’s daughter – the daughter of this man. The followers of this approach conclude that “noun +–‘s” is not a morphological form of the noun, but a syntactical construction and there is no longer a morphological category of case in English.

Within the general semantics of appurtenance, the following semantic subtypes of the genitive can be distinguished:

1.      the genitive of possessor (of inorganic possession) (родительный обладателя (неорганического обладания), e.g.: Tom’s toy; this type of meaning can be explicitly demonstrated by a special transformational diagnostic test: Tom’s toy à the toy belongs to Tom;

2.      the genitive of the whole (of organic possession) (родительный целого (органического обладания), e.g.: Tom’s hand à the hand is a part of Tom; as a subtype the genitive of received qualification can be distinguished, e.g.: Tom’s vanity à vanity is the peculiar feature of Tom;

3.      the genitive of agent, or subject of action (родительный агента действия (субъекта действия), e.g.: Tom’s actions à Tom acts; the minor subtype of this is the genitive of author, e.g.: Dickens’s novels à the novels written by Dickens;

4.      the genitive of patient, or object of action(родительный пациенса (объекта действия),, e.g.: the hostages’ release à the hostages were released;

5.      the genitive of destination (родительный предназначения), e.g.: women’s underwear à underwear for women;

6.      the genitive of qualification (родительный качества), e.g.: a girl’s voice à the voice characteristic of a girl, peculiar to a girl; subtype – the genitive of comparison, e.g.: a cock’s self-confidence à self-confidence like that of a cock, resembling the self-confidence of a cock;

7.      the adverbial genitive (usually of place and time modification) (адвербиальный родительный), e.g.: yesterday’s talks à the talks that took place yesterday;

8.      the genitive of quantity (родительный количества), e.g.: a three miles’ distance from here.

As a separate type of genitive the so-called “absolute genitive” is distinguished, when the noun in the genitive case is used independently, not as an attribute of another noun, e.g.: at the baker’s, at Tom’s.

The category of case of nouns is traditionally treated in correlation with the case of personal pronouns, which substitute for nouns. The following four case forms of personal pronouns are traditionally recognized: the nominative case (I, we, you, he, etc.), the objective case (me, us, you, him, etc.); to these the possessive pronouns are added in two forms: the conjoint form (my, our, your, his, etc.) and the absolute form (mine, ours, yours, his, etc.).