English Grammar and Language Usage: Part 14

case

The grammatical term case derives from Latin grammar, where nouns were described  as having six cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative. A number of grammars of English even used the Latin-style paradigm:

English Latin

Nom. lord dominus

Voc. O lord domine

Acc.  lord dominum

Gen. lord’s domini

Dat.   to/for a lord domino

Abl.   by/with/from a lord domino

 

Latin nouns showed their relationship to other words in the sentence by their case endings. English nouns can play the same roles in sentences as their Latin counterparts but relationships are signalled mainly by word order and by prepositions rather than by case endings. For example, in the sentences:

 

The dog bit the child.

The child bit the dog.

the forms of dog and child do not change. It is word order that indicates which noun is the subject (in the nominative case) and which is the object (in the accusative case). Similarly, the meanings carried by the -o endings in the Latin word domino are indicated in English by the use of the prepositions to/for/by/with/from plus an article.

Case is not as relevant to the description of English as it was to Latin. Only one case occurs in English nouns, the genitive or possessive case indicated by ’s or s’:

 

the boy’s money the boys’ money

 

Even here, possession can also be indicated by the use of of: the money of the boys

Indeed, the of construction is more likely with inanimate nouns:

 

the branches of the tree the eye of the needle

 

In English, case is also found in the following pronouns:

Nominative Accusative Genitive

I	me	my/mine
he	him	his
she	her	her/hers
we	us	our/ours
they	them	their/theirs
who	whom	whose

 

(In some grammars, the forms my, your, his, her, our, their, whose are called ‘possessive adjectives’).

The pronouns you and it do not show differences between the nominative and the accusative but are marked for the genitive:

Nominative/Accusative Genitive

you your/yours it its

 

A number of difficulties occur with the use of pronouns in that speakers are not always certain whether to use the nominative or the accusative forms. The following rules should help:

1  The nominative is always used in subject position, including compound subjects:

 

John and I hardly ever go fishing any more.

She and John are twins.

(A useful rule to remember is that when the compound can be replaced by we, then the form X and I is obligatory.)

2  In formal speech and writing, the BE verb requires the nominative form both before and after:

 

It was he who discovered the solution.

Who is the Scarlet Pimpernel? I am he.

 

3   In formal speech and writing, the nominative is required in comparisons involving

than:

 

He is taller than I.

She is taller than he.

 

4  The accusative case of pronouns is used when they are the objects in a sentence:

 

She loves him and us.

He visited John and me.

 

(When the compound can be replaced by us then X and me is obligatory.) 5 The accusative case of pronouns must be used after prepositions:

 

between you and me before them

The money was left to him and me/us.

 

6 Who is the subject pronoun and whom the form used as an object:

 

Whom did you see?

He is the man whom we met in France.

 

and after a preposition:

 

To whom did you give it?

He is the scholar for whom the collection was made.

 

In colloquial speech, whom can sound pedantic and the sentences:

 

Who did you see?

He is the man we met in France.

Who did you give it to?

 

are more likely to be spoken than their more formal (and more correct) counterparts. Even in speech, however, if the pronoun comes immediately after a preposition, then whom must be used.

7 There are two points to be remembered concerning the use of the genitive case of pronouns. First, apostrophes should not be used with any of the pronouns above:

 

I prefer hers to his. What is its name?

Why is theirs so much better?

Whose is it? Whose coat is it?

 

It is, however, essential to use an apostrophe with one: One must do one’s best for one’s children.

Secondly, the possessive adjective should be used before gerunds (-ing forms used as nouns):

 

His arriving so unexpectedly caused a number of problems.

I have encouraged their taking part in the marathon.

 

See: genitive, possession, pronoun.

 

 

 

case grammar

 

Case grammar is a descriptive model devised by C.J.Fillmore in the late 1960s. Fillmore concentrated attention on the fact that many verbs involving movement or change (e.g. BREAK, CLOSE, TEAR) could occur in sets of sentences where a group of nouns could fill different slots in the sentence:

 

John broke the glass.

John broke the glass with the hammer. The hammer broke the glass.

The glass broke.

 

It seems clear that, despite the surface difference in the sentences above, John, glass and hammer have consistent roles: John is invariably the agent, the hammer is always the instrument and the glass is the noun which receives the action. Fillmore suggested that, in deep structure, nouns are involved in case relationships with verbs. In some languages, such as Latin or Greek, the relationships show up as case endings; in other languages, however, the relationships may be signalled by word order and the use of prepositions or postpositions.

Fillmore’s model is attractive in that it underlines the universality of certain relationships in language. Every speaker expresses views concerning agents and experiencers such as:

John hit Peter.

 

every society is aware that certain actions can only be performed with an instrument of some type; and we all understand sources and goals, time and place. In Fillmore’s view the relationships are universal but the surface manifestations of case differ from one language to another.

See: ergative, transformational grammar.

 

 

 

catch phrase

 

A catch phrase is a fixed phrase or slogan popularised by an entertainer, a politician, an advertisement or the media. The popularity of a catch phrase is often temporary and  many readers may have already forgotten Fritz Mondale’s borrowed advertising slogan:

 

Where’s the beef?

 

in the 1984 US Democratic Primaries. Other well-known catch phrases include:

 

Come up and see me sometime (Mae West).

If the Tories get up your nose, picket (Labour/TUC slogan).

 

See: cliché, fad words, idioms.

 

 

 

catch-22

 

The phrase catch-22 derives from the name of a novel published by J.Heller in 1961. This phenomenon, also referred to as ‘a no-win situation’ and ‘Hobson’s choice’, involves a person in circumstances where no move can lead to a satisfactory outcome. An early example of a catch-22 situation was a technique used in the reign of Henry VII (1485– 1509) called ‘Morton’s Fork’. This was meant to curb the power of the barons by taxing them severely. Archbishop Morton reasoned that if a baron spent a lot of money, then he must have a lot which he could contribute to the king; alternatively, if a baron was not spending a lot of money, he must be saving a lot which he could contribute to the king.

catholic, Catholic

 

The word catholic with a lower case c is an adjective meaning ‘universal’:

 

His interests as a scholar were catholic: he was not only fascinated by Creoles but found pleasure and stimulation in literature, philosophy and psychology.

 

Catholic with a capital C can be both a noun and an adjective:

 

He became a Catholic on his deathbed.

She was not very interested in Catholic dogma.

 

In most parts of the world Catholic is equivalent to Roman Catholic.

 

 

 

causative

 

Many sentences in English can be shown to include a causal element in the verb:

 

Macbeth killed Duncan.

 

is the equivalent of:

 

Macbeth caused Duncan to die.

 

and:

 

Mary improved the design.

 

can be interpreted as:

 

Mary caused the design to be/become better.

 

The same verb can occur in both causative and non-causative sentences:

 

Mary cooled the milk (i.e. she caused it to cool).

Mary cooled down.

and many adjectives and verbs are related causatively. Often synthetic causative verbs are formed by adding -ate, -ify and -ise to adjectives or nouns:

 

activate (cause to become active) beautify (cause to become beautiful) terrorise (cause to become terrified)

 

See: analytic, ergative, prime verbs, synthetic.

 

 

 

Celtic influences

 

Celtic influence on English has probably been continuous over the last fifteen hundred years but may have been greatest:

1  when the Angles, Saxons and Jutes first arrived in Britain during the fifth century and

2  during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries when large numbers of Celts moved into the cities and into London in particular

Because the Celts have been in an inferior position to the Germanic peoples who settled in Britain, much of the influence from Cornish, Irish and Scots Gaelic and from Welsh has either been denied or underestimated by scholars. Wrenn is fairly typical of English scholars in his claim (1958):

 

Celtic influences have been sporadic and almost negligible…

 

and the following extract from the Oxford English Dictionary vol. 2, p. 592 illustrates the too-easy dismissal of Celtic influences:

 

Cog sb. 2 [ME cogge, found from 13th c.: the Sw.kugge, Norw.kug, pl.kugger, in same sense, are evidently cognate; but the relations between them are not determined. The Celtic words, Ir., Gael.cog, Welsh cocas, uncritically cited as the prob. source, are (as usual in such cases) from English.]

 

In the case of cog sb. 2, the OED editors may be correct in dismissing the Celtic etymology, but the bracketed parenthesis is indicative of an attitude that tends to see all influence from the English-Celtic contact as one-way traffic.

During the invasion of Britain, many Celts fled to the fringes of the British Isles— Cornwall, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Scotland and Wales—but many of the women must have intermarried with the invaders, a fact that helps account for the preservation of topographical terms such as:

 

avon (river)

down (low hill)

tor (hill)

 

It is a truism that history is always the history of the conqueror and so it is not possible to say when or how other Celtic words entered English, but some did. From Irish: banshee, bog, brock (badger), colleen, leprechaun, trousers; from Scots Gaelic: cairn, loch, pibroch (pipe music), plaid, sporran, whisky; and from Welsh: bard, cromlech, eisteddfod, penguin. In addition to the above, now widely recognised as deriving from Celtic languages, we find items of low prestige listed in English dictionaries as ‘etymology unknown’ but having Celtic cognates going back before the item was first recorded in English. Among these are: cadge, cog (cheat), slob, spree and twig (understand).

But the influence from Celtic was not limited to vocabulary. Contemporary English makes the following distinction:

 

I go/I am going

 

where French, for example, covers both with:

 

je vais

 

The Celtic languages have a tripartite distinction represented in Gaelic by:

 

téighim (GO+I)

táim ag dul (BE+I going)

bim ag dul (BE+habitual+I going)

 

The Celts thus make aspectual distinctions not regularly found in other West European languages. Indeed, according to Otto Jespersen, progressive aspect was not commonly found in English until early in the seventeenth century. It thus seems likely that Celtic influences contributed to the occurrence or at least reinforcement of the aspectual distinctions now made in English.

See: Anglo-Irish, aspect, Hiberno-English, Scottish English, Welsh English.