IV. Different views on the category of case

Different theories are put forward in connection with the category of case of the English noun. First of all some linguists deny the existence of the category of case of the English noun. They base their theory on the fact that in Modern English the apostrophe s inflection may be added not only to nouns but to whole groups of words. This phenomenon is called group possessive or group genitive. For example we have the group possessive when the apostrophe s is joined to two nouns connected by the conjunction “and”: Smith and Brown’s company, Mum and Dad’s room.

The apostrophe s may be joined to a group of words ending to a numeral.

E.g. He answered my question after a minute or two’s pause.

The apostrophe s may be joined to a noun phrase which may even contain a subordinate clause. E.g. The man I saw yesterday’s son is in Kiev now. The girl I have been dancing with’s name is Helen.

The linguists who deny the existence of the category of case of the noun say that the ‘s is no longer a grammatical morpheme of the possessive case but it has become a certain syntactical element. Prof.Vorontsova called this syntactical element “a postposition” (послелог).

Professor Bloch considers that this extreme point of view can hardly be accepted at present because as a rule, in the greatest majority of cases the apostrophe s is attached to join to nouns. Word combinations like “Smith and Brown’s company” or “a minute or two’s pause” are very rare in English. Statistics show that in 96% of examples the apostrophe s is added to word combinations.

Yet apostrophe s has peculiarities of its own. It is different from the case morphemes in other languages and it is clear that the case system of the modern English noun is undergoing (претерпевает) changes.

There are theories according to which the English noun has more than two cases. One of such theories is the theory of positional cases (позиционных падежей). According to that theory the unchangeable forms of nouns are understood as different cases because of the different positions of the nouns in the sentence. There are such cases as the Nominative case, the Dative case, the Accusative case, the Genitive case, the Vocative case.

Such four cases as the nominative case, the dative case, the accusative case and the vocative case are named in addition to the genitive case which is expressed morphologically by S. The Nominative case is the case of the subject, the Dative case is the case of the indirect object, the Accusative case is the case of the direct object and the Vocative case is the case of the address.

E.g. Peter (The Nominative case) gave his sister (The Dative case) an apple (The Accusative case). Come along, Peter (The Vocative case)!

The theory of positional cases can be easily criticized. The case is a morphological category and it must be expressed by grammatical morphemes, but the so-called nominative, dative,accusativeand vocative cases are not expressed by morphological morphemes.

Some linguists put forward the theory which is called the theory of prepositional cases. According to that theory the cases of the English nouns may be expressed by means of prepositions and word-order. The Genitive case is expressed not only by means of the apostrophe and ending, but by the preposition as well. The Dative case is expressed by the preposition TO. The Accusative case is distinguished from the Dative case by the word order only.

This theory has the same drawbacks as the theory of positional cases. Linguists try to find in the English language the same cases which are to be found in German and other languages. But the fact is that in the English language only one case is characterized by the grammatical morpheme “apostrophe s”, and it is opposed to the common case which is characterized by the zero morpheme. Consequently, most linguists consider that the category of case of the English nouns is expressed by the opposition of the common case and the possessive case.

Nevertheless it is very important to know the meanings of English prepositions which render the meaning of the cases in other languages. Thus when we teach pupils we explain that the English preposition OF renders the meaning of the Russian Genitive case. The English preposition TO renders the meaning of the Russian Dative case. The prepositions BY and WITH render the meanings of the Russian Instrumental case.