Case (definition)

Definition

'Case' indicates the function of Noun Phrases in a sentence. In English only pronouns are marked for case.

• A pronoun functioning as the subject of a sentence is said to be in the Nominative Case (eg. I, he, she, we, they).
• A pronoun functioning as the object of a sentence is said to be in the Accusative Case (e.g. me, him, her, us, them).
• A pronoun functioning as a possessor is typically in the [[Genitive Case (definition)|Genitive Case), (e.g. my, your, his, her, our, their).
• English doesn't have a dative case, but instead marks indirect object and related notions with prepositions.

Gaelic makes no distinction between Nominative and Accusative case and instead combines them into a common case (also sometimes called Direct Case). It does however, distinguish a genitive case and dative case. These are most readily visible in the determiner (article) system of the language.

See Also

• Accusative Case
• Common Case
• Dative Case
• Genitive Case
• Nominative Case
• Articles

External Links

Note: Wikipedia can be edited by anyone and often pages are vandalized or uninformed, so be careful with any links posted below!

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case

• http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsCase.htm

References

SIL entry on Case
"The Linguistics Encyclopedia" by Kirsten Malmkjær (2002), pgs. 251-256