Declension
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In linguistics, declension is a paradigm of inflected nouns. In many Indo-European languages, the inflected forms indicate its grammatical role. An example in English is the way "he" changes to "him" when it follows a verb or preposition, and to "his" when it is possessive. (HE is my friend. I know HIM. I sent it to HIM. This is HIS book. Or a better example of this: Whose books are these? To whom belong these books?)
In inflected languages, nouns are said to decline into different forms, or morphological cases, which indicate the nouns' function in a sentence. Morphological cases are one way of indicating grammatical case; other ways are listed below. Morphological cases are usually indicated by desinences (endings), but additionally, or alternatively, morphological modifications of the nominal stem may occur (see Nonconcatenative morphology, Apophony, umlaut)
Declension is seen, for example, in many Indo-European languages like Latin, Russian, German and Sanskrit; in Dravidian languages like Tamil; in most Uralic languages, such as Finnish and Hungarian; in Swahili and many others. Old English had an extensive case system. In modern English grammar, the same information is now mostly conveyed with word order and prepositions, though a few remnants of the older declined form of English still exist (as in "he" vs. "him"; see Declension in English).
An example of a Latin noun declension is given below, using the word homō 'man.' Since Latin has no articles, that is, no words for 'the' or 'a,' they have been added in the translations.
- homō 'the man' [as a subject] (e.g. homo ibi stat 'the man is standing there')
- hominis 'of the man' (e.g. nōmen hominis est Claudius 'the name of the man is Claudius')
- hominī 'to the man' (e.g. hominī donum dedī 'I gave a present to the man')
- hominem 'the man' [as a direct object] (e.g. hominem vidi 'I saw the man')
- homine 'the man' [in various uses not covered by the above] (e.g. sum altior homine 'I am taller than the man')
The term declension can also refer to the varied forms working together as a system. For example, the above declension differs from the a-declension, which consists mostly of feminine nouns.
- fēmina 'the woman' [as a subject]
- fēminae 'of the woman'
- fēminae 'to the woman'
- fēminam 'the woman' [as a direct object]
- fēminā 'the woman' [various uses]
Notice that the direct object form of homo ends in -em and the direct object form of femina ends in -am. The direct object form of manus 'hand' ends in -um. Declensions are distinguished by the presence of certain vowels or consonants.
Though English pronouns can have subject and object forms (he/him, she/her), nouns show only a singular/plural- and a possessive/non-possessive-distinction (chair, chairs, chair's, chairs'). Note there is no difference in form between "the chair is here" (subject) and "I saw the chair" (direct object). Generally the only variation in English nouns is the insertion of an -e or e-sound for purposes of pronunciation (beach, beaches, beach's, beaches'). The n-declension is restricted to words like ox-oxen, brother-brethren, and child-children, though in Medieval English the s-declension and the n-declension were in stronger competition.
The hard-core grammarian might also wish to know the following:
Languages are categorized into several case systems, based on how they group verb agents and patients into cases:
- Nominative-accusative: The agent of both transitive and intransitive verbs is always in the nominative case. The patient of a (transitive) verb is in the accusative case. The dative case may also be present.
- Ergative-absolutive (or simply ergative): The patient of a verb is always in the absolutive case, along with the agent of intransitive verbs. If both agent and patient are present, the agent is in the ergative case.
- Active-stative (also called active): The agent of a verb is always in the subject case, and the patient is always in the object case. The case does not depend on whether a verb is used in a transitive or intransitive form.
- Trigger: One noun in a sentence is the topic or focus. This noun is in the trigger case, and information elsewhere in the sentence (for example a verb affix in Tagalog) specifies the role of the trigger. The trigger may be identified as the agent, patient, etc. Other nouns may be inflected for case, but the inflections are overloaded; for example, in Tagalog, the subject and object of a verb are both expressed in the genitive case when they are not in the trigger case.
The following are systems that some languages use to mark case instead of, or in addition to, declension:
- Positional: Nouns are not inflected for case; the position of a noun in the sentence expresses its case.
- Prepositional/postpositional: Nouns are accompanied by words that mark case, but the noun itself is not modified.
Some languages have more than 20 cases. For an example of a language that uses a large number of cases, see Finnish language noun cases.
The lemma forms of words, which is the form chosen by convention as the canonical form of a word, is usually the most unmarked or basic case, which is typically the nominative, trigger, or absolutive case, whichever a language may have.
See also
External links
- The Status of Morphological Case in the Icelandic Lexicon by Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson. Discussion of whether cases convey any inherent syntactic or semantic meaning.
- Optimal Case: The Distribution of Case in German and Icelandic by Dieter Wunderlich
- A long list of names for cases found in one language or another
- Scene 8, Monty Python's the Life of Brian explains Latin declension. Best if viewed in the context of the movie before reading.als:Deklination
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