Saturday, December 27, 2008

Case:Subjective, Objective, Possessive

Case (from: http://www.learnenglish.de/grammar/casetext.htm)

Case is the grammatical function of a noun or pronoun. The three cases in modern English are subjective (he), objective (him) and possessive (his). They may seem more familiar in their old English form - nominative, accusative and genitive. There is no dative case in modern English.

First though the good news. You cannot really go wrong here, we have shed most of our cases and as a result English is easier than many other languages because nouns and some indefinite pronouns (anyone, someone, everyone, and so on) only have a distinctive case form for the possessive. However, a remnant of old English is that pronouns have distinctive forms in all three cases and must be used with care.

The pronoun cases are simple. There are just three:-
1. Subjective case: pronouns used as subject.
2. Objective case: pronouns used as objects of verbs or prepositions.
3. Possessive case: pronouns which express ownership.

Personal Pronoun

Subjective/Nominative

Objective/Accusative

Possessive/Genitive

Referring to the

subject in a sentence

Referring to the object

in a sentence

The apostrophe form

of the word ("Lynne's).




I

Me

Mine

You

You

Yours

He

Him

His

She

Her

Hers

It

It

Its

We

Us

Ours

They

Them

Theirs

Who

Whom

Whose


These pronouns, and who and its compounds, are the only words that are inflected in all three cases (subjective, objective, possessive). In nouns the first two cases (subjective and objective) are indistinguishable, and are called the common case. One result of this simplicity is that, the sense of case being almost lost, the few mistakes that can be made are made often, even by native speakers, some of them so often that they are now almost right by prescription.

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