CASE is a grammatical category that tells the listener who is doing the action and who is receiving the action.
(Please note: By tradition, all grammatical categories are written in CAPITAL letters.)
Background Information: A Simple Sentence[]
Most English sentence follows the pattern:
- S = NP1 + VP + NP2
Note: A simple sentence has 2 noun phrases (NP) and a verb phrase (VP). The simplest NP is a simple noun (e.g. 'John' and 'a bear') and the simplest VP is simple verb (e.g. 'eats').
So a simple English sentence looks like this:
- eg 1: John eats a bear.
- eg 2: A bear eats John.
What is CASE[]
Both these sentences use the same words, but the meaning is very different because of grammatical information added by CASE!
CASE let's the listener know who is doing the action of eating. Is it 'John' doing the eating or is it 'a bear' doing the eating?
Important: In English the order of the words adds CASE information to the sentence.
In the sentence:
- John eats a bear
We know John is doing the eating, because John appears before 'eats' in the sentence. The NP that does the action is called the Subject of the sentence.
We know that the a bear is receiving the action (in other words, we know that a bear is being eaten) because it appears after 'eats' in the sentence. The NP that receives the action is called the Object of the sentence.
Other languages[]
For some languages, the order of the words is not very important (e.g. Latin). These languages do not use the order of the words to give the CASE information. Instead, they use Inflectional affixes to let the listener know who is doing the action and who is receiving the action.
Because of this, these languages can rearrange the order of the words to create emphasis, without losing the meaning of the sentence.
A Latin example:
- A bear eats John
- John manducat ursi.
- John eats a bear
- Ursus manducat John.
- John ursus manducat.
The last 2 sentences have the same meaning, because the -us at the end of Ursus tells the listener that it is the bear that is receiving the action (i.e. it is the bear that is being eaten).