Talk:Grammatical case

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

See also: Talk:Declension

[edit] "Case" means "morphological case"

The article is in dire need of rewriting. Now the text uses the term 'case' in two quite distinct meanings: a) morphological case and b) some kind of 'astract case' roughly equal to a grammatical or semantic role (which is something altogether different from morphological case). The latter use of the term 'case' is not unanimously accepted by linguists, and therefore it is incorrect to state e.g. that "all languages distinguish cases in some fashion", as now maintained in the second sentence of the article. For example, Hawaiian does not distinguish (morphological) case, even though it does of course distinguish e.g. between subject and object, or between various semantic roles.

English does not have morphological case either (except for pronouns); the genitive -'s is not a case form because it is a clitic. Therefore, it an extremely odd choice to illustrate "Cases in Indo-European languages" with English sentences, which in reality only illustrate the lack of case.--AAikio 10:20, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

You're reaching a bit; the article in fact makes a point of distinguishing between grammatical and semantic constructs, and assigns the term "case" only to the former, while linking to thematic role for a discussion of the latter. Non-morphological case is not "abstract" at all; it's reflected in word order, for example. And these aren't two distinct meanings; rather, morphological case is a subset of grammatical case. However, as pointed out at the very beginning of the article, "it is only customary to say that a language has cases when these are codified in the morphology of its nouns". —Ruakh_TALK 18:32, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The examples

If we're going to give examples in modern English, wouldn't it be better to use the personal pronouns, so the reader could see them inflect? FilipeS (talk) 01:22, 6 December 2007 (UTC)