Introducing English Linguistics

Table 2.2. The marking of case, number, and gender in Latin and Modern
English for the word girl
Latin
English
Case
Singular
Plural
Singular
Plural
Nominative
puella
puellae
girl
girls
Genitive
puellae
puellarum
girl’s
girls’
Dative
puellae
puellis
girl
girls
Accusative
puellam
puellas
girl
girls
Ablative
puella
puellis
girl
girls
Vocative
puella
puellae
girl
girls
Latin is a language in which nouns are marked for one of three genders:
masculine, feminine, and neuter. In Table 2.2, the Latin word for Modern
English girl, which contains the base form puell-, is marked for the femi-
nine gender and would, accordingly, receive specific endings depending
on its case – nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, and voca-
tive – and its number (i.e. whether girl is singular or plural). Markings of
this nature are what Comrie (1990: 337–8) terms as “fusional”; that is,

---

there are not separate inflections for case and for number. Instead, case
and number work together, producing a single combined inflection. This
is a common system for many Indo-European languages.
As mentioned earlier, case forms correspond, roughly, to the function of a
word in a given sentence or clause. Thus, in Latin, puell- will receive different
markers if it is subject (nominative), possessive (genitive), indirect object
(dative), direct object (accusative), vocative (a term of address, as Mary is in
the English sentence Hello, Mary), or ablative (a mixed case corresponding, for
instance, to the instrumental use of with in I cut the bread with a knife). For
instance, in (1a) and (b), puell- is subject of each sentence; therefore, the nom-
inative form puella is used in the singular and puellae in the plural.
(1) a. Puella est tarda.
‘[The] girl is late’
b. Puellae sunt tardae.
‘[The] girls are late’
In (2a) and (b), puell- is a direct object, resulting in the accusative form 
puellam for the singular and puellas for the plural.
(2) a. Ego amo puellam.
‘I like [the] girl’
b. Ego amo puellas.
‘I like [the] girls’
Adjectives in Latin also contain inflections that agree in case, number,
and gender with the nouns that they follow. Thus, when the adjective
parvus ‘small’ occurs before puella in the nominative case, it would be
marked as nominative, singular, and feminine in a sentence such as Puella
parva est tarda. Latin lacks articles, but in languages with inflectional sys-
tems similar to Latin that contain articles, definite articles too will have to
agree with the nouns they precede. In Modern German, for instance, (3a)
contains a noun, Mann, that is masculine, singular, and nominative; the
article and adjective before it agree in case, number, and gender. Example
(3b) contains the same noun phrase, but this time in the accusative case.
(3) a. Der müde Mann arbeitete spät.
‘The tired man worked late’
b. Wir berieten den müden Mann.
‘We consulted the tired man’
Modern English has a relatively simplified system for marking case,
number, and gender. The definite article the and all adjectives preceding
nouns have no markings for case, number, or gender, though number is
marked on demonstrative pronouns, which like articles are members of
the more general class of determinatives: this/that in the singular (e.g. this
book),  these/those in the plural (these books). As Table 2.2 shows, on nouns,
number and one case, the genitive, are marked: orthographic s marks
both possessives (e.g. the girl’s book) and plurals (e.g. singular girl S plural
girls), except in cases of irregular plurals, such as man’s and men’s. Since s
marks both plural and genitive nouns, a noun that is both plural and
28
INTRODUCING ENGLISH LINGUISTICS

---

genitive will contain only a single inflection. In writing, an apostrophe is
used before s to mark singular nouns (e.g. mother’s) but after s (e.g. mothers’)
to mark plural nouns. However, in speech, the pronunciation of both the
singular and plural genitives is identical, since apostrophes have no spo-
ken analogue: they are mainly a written form and have no distinct pro-
nunciation in speech. Except when it is marked for the genitive case, the
form of a noun such as girl will remain constant, regardless of its func-
tion; that is, there is no change in form for girl[s] whether it is function-
ing as subject (The girl[s] bought some books), for instance, or object (We called
the girl[s]).
The tendency for older languages such as Latin to have considerable
morphological complexity and newer ones such as English to have less
complexity should not necessarily be viewed as a developmental trend.
Although many modern Indo-European languages (e.g. English and
Spanish) have indeed become morphologically less complex than their
ancestral languages (Old English and Latin, respectively), many modern
Indo-European languages (e.g. German, Greek, and Russian) remain mor-
phologically quite complex.