Does English have case?

English has a reduced case system. It survives mainly on pronouns, which distinguish nominative ('he') from accusative ('him'), and in the possessive ending. Nouns no longer show the rich case marking of Old English or Latin.

What is abstract Case?

Abstract Case is a syntactic licensing requirement on noun phrases posited in generative theory, present even where no overt case marking appears. It explains why noun phrases must occur in particular positions to be grammatical.

Case and Agreement

Case marks the grammatical or semantic relation of a noun phrase, and agreement copies features of one element onto another; both are central means by which morphology expresses syntactic relations.

Definition

Case is the morphological marking borne by a noun phrase to signal its grammatical or semantic role; agreement is the systematic covariance in inflectional features between a controlling element and a target.

Scope

This topic covers case systems (their inventories, the distinction between grammatical and semantic cases, and abstract Case as a licensing condition) and agreement systems (controllers, targets, features, and domains). It does not cover the grammatical relations themselves, thematic roles, or alignment typology, which are treated in sibling topics.

Core questions

What relations do case systems encode, and how do grammatical and semantic cases differ?
How does abstract Case license noun phrases in syntactic theory?
What are the controllers, targets, features, and domains of agreement?
How are case and agreement related to one another and to grammatical relations?

Key concepts

grammatical case
semantic case
abstract Case
Case Filter
agreement controller and target
agreement features and domain

Key theories

Case Theory and the Case Filter: The Government and Binding principle that every overt noun phrase must be assigned abstract Case, with the Case Filter ruling out noun phrases that fail to receive it, deriving many distributional facts.
Canonical agreement: Corbett's framework defining agreement through a controller, a target, agreement features, and a domain, with canonical agreement as the clearest case against which non-canonical patterns are measured.

History

Case has been studied since the ancient grammarians, who named the traditional cases. Blake (2001) surveys case systems cross-linguistically. In generative syntax, Chomsky (1981) introduced abstract Case and the Case Filter as licensing conditions on noun phrases, later tied to agreement through Agree in the Minimalist Program. Corbett (2006) systematised the typology of agreement and its canonical and non-canonical realisations.

Debates

Is case assigned configurationally or by dependency?: Whether case reflects structural configuration and feature-checking with a functional head, or is assigned by relations of dependency between noun phrases, as in dependent-case theories.

Key figures

Barry J. Blake
Greville Corbett
Noam Chomsky

Seminal works

blake2001
corbett2006
chomsky1981

Frequently asked questions

Does English have case?: English has a reduced case system. It survives mainly on pronouns, which distinguish nominative ('he') from accusative ('him'), and in the possessive ending. Nouns no longer show the rich case marking of Old English or Latin.
What is abstract Case?: Abstract Case is a syntactic licensing requirement on noun phrases posited in generative theory, present even where no overt case marking appears. It explains why noun phrases must occur in particular positions to be grammatical.