Introducing English Linguistics

Grammatical similarities.
While the comparison of cognate vocabulary
is crucial to the comparative method, other linguistic similarities and dif-
ferences among languages can provide additional evidence that lan-
guages should be classified in similar or different language families. One
among many grammatical features of many Indo-European languages is
that they contain inflections marking  case,  number, and gender on
nouns, adjectives, and (sometimes) articles. Although this system can be
traced back to Proto-Indo-European (PIE), some Indo-European languages
have greatly simplified the system:
Case: PIE had eight cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, abla-
tive, dative, locative, and instrumental (Baldi 1990: 54). Each of these
cases marked the role that a noun and associated article and adjective
played in a sentence. For instance, the nominative case is typically
associated with the subject of a sentence, the accusative case with the
object
. Indo-European languages with fewer cases than PIE will usual-
ly have at least the nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative cases
(e.g. Modern German and Dutch). Latin has six cases: the aforemen-
tioned cases, plus the ablative and vocative. Russian also has six cases,
but instead of the ablative and vocative, it has the instrumental and
locative. Modern English marks one case on nouns – the genitive –
but three cases on pronouns: nominative (or “subjective” in some
English grammars; e.g. I, he, she), accusative (or “objective”; e.g. me,
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INTRODUCING ENGLISH LINGUISTICS

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him, her), and genitive (or “possessive”; e.g. my, his, her). Modern
Spanish also marks case only on pronouns, but unlike English, has no
case markings for nouns.
Number: PIE distinguished three classes of number: singular (‘one’), dual
(‘two’), and plural (‘more than two’). While many older Indo-European
languages, such as Sanskrit (a language within the Indo-Aryan branch
of Indo-European), preserve this three-way system, most mark only
singular (‘one’) and plural (‘more than one’).
Gender: PIE had three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter.
Although languages such as German, Polish, Russian, and Czech
exhibit all three genders, other Indo-European languages distinguish
only masculine and feminine, a binary system evident in such Italic
languages as French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. English is like
Spanish or French, except that gender is only indicated on pronouns:
masculine (he/him) and feminine (she/her). The pronoun it is arguably
neuter, but its plural counterpart, they, is really gender-neutral, since
it can refer to any plural noun, regardless of its gender.
The variation in how Indo-European languages mark case, number, and
gender is not indicative of a more general morphological trend. As Baldi
(1990: 51) notes, many Indo-European languages exhibit highly “complex
morphology,” others “much less morphological complexity, with fewer
formal categories and distinctions.” To illustrate this contrast, Table 2.2
compares markings for case, number, and gender in Latin, a heavily
inflected language, with Modern English, a language which has lost many
of its inflections.
The development of English
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