Grammatical categories. The use of cases

The OE noun had two grammatical categories: number and case. Also, nouns distinguished three genders, but gender was not a grammatical category; it was merely a classifying feature accounting for the division of nouns into morphological classes. The category of number consisted of two members: singular and plural. The noun had four cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accusative.

The Nom. can be defined as the case of the active agent, for it was the case of the subject mainly used with verbs denoting activity; the Nom. could also indicate the subject characterized by a certain quality or state; could serve as a predicative and as the case of address.

The Gen. case was primarily the case of nouns and pronouns serving as attributes to other nouns. The meanings of the Gen. case were very complex and can only be grouped under the headings “Subjective” and “Objective” Gen. Subjective Gen. is associated with the possessive meaning and the meaning of origin. Objective Gen. is associated with what is termed “partitive meaning” as in sum hund scipa ‘a hundred of ships’.

Dat. was the chief case used with prepositions, e.g. on morзenne ‘in the morning’

The Acc. case was the form that indicated a relationship to a verb. Being the direct object it denoted the recipient of an action, the result of the action and other meanings.

The history of English provides an example of nounal categories with­ering away. In Old English there were four cases (nominative, accusative, genitive and dative) plus a vestigial instrumental. The cases inOld English were only weakly differentiated, with more differentiation in the demonstra­tive pronoun than in the noun. The Old English case paradigms were strik­ingly similar to those of German, whether old or modern, but while German has lost only the instrumental from Old High German to modern German, English lost almost the entire system between the late tenth and thirteenth centuries.

Two phonological changes destroyed the case system. One was the re­duction of unstressed vowels to the schwa. The other was the loss of word-final -n in inflections. Virtually the only forms to survive these changes were the endings in -s, the genitive singular of nouns in the general mascu­line and neuter classes and the nominative-accusative plural of nouns in the general masculine class. Both these forms expanded on all paradigms by the end of the Middle English period. The loss of inflection entailed the loss of grammatical gender.

The almost ultimate elimination of case in English has resulted in the use of prepositions so that all adverbial relations have to be expressed with the help of prepositions.