Part II
When reading a sentence, next to words you also read structure. The structure can be expressed by sequence or punctuation marks, but there is also something called ‘roles’. This simply gives a word a role. With other words: it tells how the word relates to the action described by the verb. Very often the roles are not identified, so you have to use context or habit to detect them. When roles do are identified, we speak of grammatical cases. There are an infinite number of different roles, and quite a lot of defined cases, though in English and a lot of other language four cases seem to be enough. Still we can access the infinite number of roles needed with these languages; this because roles are distributed over the cases; and the rest is defined with prepositions and word order.
For completion’s sake I will treat the four cases as present in English.
Nominative
This is the subject in the sentence. The action described by the verb will directly correlate with this word. The object is usually also the instigator of the action.
“Pete threw the ball.”
Accusative
This is the direct object in the sentence. The action described by the verb will be subjected upon this object.
“He tripped Pete.”
Genitive
This indicates a possessor. Other words linked to a genitive are identified as a possession.
“Pete’s ball”
Dative
This is the indirect object in the sentence. The action described by the verb will be pointed toward this object in most situations.
“He gave it to Pete.”
Dative is also a garbage collector for all roles not described by the other cases: for instance a word which accompanies the subject.
“She went with Pete.”
Ok, now, where are de identifications? Yes I know, modern English has dropped the whole lot of conjugations. Old English had for each noun and adjective a series of conjugations to indicate its case. Now all we have to separate the subject from the direct object is word order.
“Dave tripped Pete” means something complete different then “Pete tripped Dave”
Ah! But we still have a conjugation to indicate a possessor: < ‘s >
All cases not treated are indicated by the preposition and thus are called indirect objects.
Now I’ve told you about cases. This is also the last thing I will tell about them. O-lingu does not need cases, but in order to explain how O-lingu expresses roles I need to explain cases and more important: how cases evolved. But I’ll save that for the next time.
Have a nice day!
Ferry Timmers
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