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Modern English is an example of a language that has a possessive case rather than a conventional genitive case. That is, Modern English indicates a genitive construction with either the possessive clitic suffix "-'s", or a prepositional genitive construction such as "x of y".
The English word case used in this sense comes from the Latin casus, which is derived from the verb cadere, "to fall", from the Proto-Indo-European root ḱh₂d-. [8] The Latin word is a calque of the Greek πτῶσις, ptôsis, lit. "falling, fall". [9] The sense is that all other cases are considered to have "fallen" away from the nominative.
The grammar of Old English differs greatly from Modern English, predominantly being much more inflected.As a Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system similar to that of the Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including constructions characteristic of the Germanic daughter languages such as ...
English has case forms for pronouns for genitive, accusative, and nominative cases. Conversely, English has only genitive case forms for 'full noun phrases' (or determiner phrases): For example, "John's blue cat" is assigned genitive case. [14]: p.148 Full noun phrases cannot be assigned accusative or nominative case.
A genitive construction involves two nouns, the head (or modified noun) and the dependent (or modifier noun). In dependent-marking languages, a dependent genitive noun modifies the head by expressing some property of it. For example, in the construction "John's jacket", "jacket" is the head and "John's" is the modifier, expressing a property of ...
A genitive absolute construction serves as a dependent clause, usually at the beginning of a sentence, in which the genitive noun is the subject of the dependent clause and the participle takes on the role of predicate. The term absolute comes from the Latin absolutus, literally meaning "made loose".
Nominative–accusative alignment can be coded by case-marking, verb agreement and/or word order. It has a wide global distribution and is the most common alignment system among the world's languages (including English). Languages with nominative–accusative alignment are commonly called nominative–accusative languages.
Sē here is an accusative reflexive pronoun referring back to the subject of the main verb i.e. Iūlia ; esse is the infinitive "to be." Note that the tense of the infinitive, translated into English, is relative to the tense of the main verb. Present infinitives, also called contemporaneous infinitives, occur at the time of the main verb.