Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
This is a list of grammatical cases as they are used by various inflectional languages that have declension. This list will mark the case, when it is used, an example of it, and then finally what language(s) the case is used in.
The sentence can be given as a grammatical puzzle [7] [8] [9] or an item on a test, [1] [2] for which one must find the proper punctuation to give it meaning. Hans Reichenbach used a similar sentence ("John where Jack had...") in his 1947 book Elements of Symbolic Logic as an exercise for the reader, to illustrate the different levels of language, namely object language and metalanguage.
As languages evolve, case systems change. In early Ancient Greek, for example, the genitive and ablative cases of given names became combined, giving five cases, rather than the six retained in Latin. In modern Hindi, the cases have been reduced to three: a direct case (for subjects and direct objects) and oblique case, and a vocative case.
The verb had in the expression had better lacks any untensed form (*Tomorrow you will have better concentrate; *I've had better work hard since I started; *We're having better concentrate) and hence is sometimes classed as a modal idiom, [31] [32] [33] a semi-modal, [97] [98] or an emerging or quasi-modal verb.
The use of certain aspects and/or tenses in the verb. The Indo-Iranian family, for example, shows a split between the perfective and the imperfective aspect. In Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu), a transitive verb in the perfective aspect causes its arguments to be marked by an ergative pattern, and the imperfective aspects trigger accusative marking. [3]
The possessive form of who is whose (for example, the man whose car is missing); however the use of whose is not restricted to persons (one can say an idea whose time has come). The word that as a relative pronoun is normally found only in restrictive relative clauses (unlike which and who , which can be used in both restrictive and ...
Case frames are subject to certain constraints, such as that a deep case can occur only once per sentence. Some of the cases are obligatory and others are optional. Obligatory cases may not be deleted, at the risk of producing ungrammatical sentences. For example, Mary gave the apples is ungrammatical in this sense.
Among all Indo-European languages, only Yaghnobi, Kurdish language varieties (including Kurmanji, Zazaki and Sorani) [6] and Pashto from the Iranian languages and Hindi/Urdu, along with some other Indo-Aryan languages, are ergative. The ergative case is also a feature of some constructed languages such as Na'vi, Ithkuil and Black Speech.