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H. Sweet’s views (1925) rest on the syntactic conception of case: case to
him is a syntactic relation that can be realized syntactically or morphologically. He
speaks of inflected and non-inflected cases (the genitive vs. the common case).
Non-inflected cases, according to the scholar, are equivalent to the nominative,
vocative, accusative, and dative of inflected languages.
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O. Jespersen (1933) speaks of the genitive and the common case. Some
grammarians (R. W. Pence (1947), H. Whitehall (1965), H. Shaw (1952)) give
three cases in English - nominative, genitive (possessive) and accusative
(objective). This three-case system, based on the analogy of the form of pronouns,
remained extremely popular in the grammars of the 20th century, including some
structural grammars (H. Whitehall). H. Whitehall, however, does not reflect the
general situation in the school of structural grammar: structuralists at large
recognize the existence of two cases - the genitive and the common.
Case expresses the relation of a word to another word in the word-group or
sentence (my sister’s coat). The category of case correlates with the objective
category of possession. The case category in English is realized through the
opposition: The Common Case :: The Possessive Case (sister :: sister’s). However,
in modern linguistics the term “genitive case” is used instead of the “possessive
case” because the meanings rendered by the “`s” sign are not only those of
possession. The scope of meanings rendered by the Genitive Case is the following:
1. Possessive Genitive : Mary’s father – Mary has a father,
2. Subjective Genitive: The doctor’s arrival – The doctor has arrived,
3. Objective Genitive : The man’s release – The man was released,
4. Genitive of origin: the boy’s story – the boy told the story,
5. Descriptive Genitive: children’s books – books for children
6. Genitive of measure and partitive genitive: a mile’s distance, a day’s trip
7. Appositive genitive: the city of London.
To avoid confusion with the plural, the marker of the genitive case is
represented in written form with an apostrophe. This fact makes possible
disengagement of –`s form from the noun to which it properly belongs. E.g.: The
man I saw yesterday’s son, where -`s is appended to the whole group (the so-called group genitive). It may even follow a word which normally does not possess such a formant, as in somebody else’s book.
There is no universal point of view as to the case system in English.
Different scholars stick to a different number of cases.
1. There are two cases. (limited case theory) The Common one and The
Genitive;
2. There are no cases at all, the form `s is optional because the same relations may be expressed by the ‘of-phrase’: the doctor’s arrival – the arrival of the doctor;
3. There are three cases: the Nominative, the Genitive, the Objective due to the existence of objective pronouns me, him, whom;
4. The theory of positional cases.
5. The theory of prepositional cases.
We adhere to the view that English does possess the category of case, which
is represented by the opposition of the two forms - the genitive vs. the nongenitive,
or the common. The marked member of the opposition is the genitive and
the unmarked the common: both members express a relation - the genitive
expresses a specific relation (the relation of possession in the wide meaning of the
word) while the common case expresses a wide range of relations including the
relation of possession, e.g. Kennedy’s house vs. the Kennedy house. While
recognizing the existence of the genitive case, we must say that the English
genitive is not a classical case. Its peculiarities are:
1) the inflection -‘s is but loosely connected with the noun (e.g. the Queen of
England’s daughter; the man I met yesterday’s son);
2) genitive constructions are paralleled by corresponding prepositional
constructions (e.g. Shakespeare’s works vs. the works of Shakespeare);
3) the use of the genitive is mainly limited to nouns denoting living beings;
4) the inflection -‘s is used both in the singular and in the plural (e.g. a boy’s
bicycle vs. the boys’ bicycles), which is not typical of case inflexions.
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