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Old English had a genitive case, which has left its mark in modern English in the form of the possessive ending 's (now sometimes referred to as the "Saxon genitive"), as well as possessive adjective forms such as his, their, etc., and in certain words derived from adverbial genitives such as once and afterwards. (Other Old English case markers ...
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.
It is a meaning relation in which a phrase "stands in" for (expresses the same content as) another where the meaning is recoverable from the context. [4] In English, pronouns mostly function as pro-forms, but there are pronouns that are not pro-forms and pro-forms that are not pronouns. [5]: 239 Pronouns can be pro-forms for non-noun phrases.
The English term, "accusative", derives from the Latin accusativus, which, in turn, is a translation of the Greek αἰτιατική. The word can also mean "causative", and that might have derived from the Greeks, [ 2 ] but the sense of the Roman translation has endured and is used in some other modern languages as the grammatical term for ...
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language discusses the possessive in greater detail, taking account of group (or phrasal) genitives like the King of England's and somebody else's and analyses the construction as an inflection of the final word of the phrase (as opposed to the head word). The discussion in support of this inflectional ...
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 ...