Re: case markers in English

From: Harlan Messinger (h.messinger_at_comcast.net)
Date: 09/07/04 

Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2004 14:09:53 -0400

"Michael Hamm 'msh210'" <msh210@math.wustl.edu> wrote in message
news:ee0fcac0.0409070944.5ff20048@posting.google.com...
> I wrote to alt.usage.english, but got no response:
> > Evan Kirshenbaum <kirshenbaum@hpl.hp.com> wrote, in part:
> > > > I saw a letter today that started "Dear Honored Guest:". Besides
> > > > the capitalization issue, which I do not wish to discuss, shouldn't
> > > > there be a comma between the adjectives?

"Dear" is a fixed formulation, and I can see it not being treated in its
ordinary role as an adjective. It's not "Guest, who is both dear and
honored". It's a letter to "Honored Guest" with the formulaic "Dear"
prefixed.

> > >
> > > I'd say that the "dear" here isn't really an adjective, but is rather
> > > marking a sort of vocative construction, much as "O" once did.

Oh, please. No.

> >
> > So it's a case marker, then, I suppose?
> >
> > When I Was Growing Up(TM), we used to call case markers
> > 'prepositions'. These were 'from', 'by', 'to', ans some others.
> > (Actually, a good many others.) 'To', for example, usually marked the
> > dative case, and 'of' the genitive. 'Throughout' marked a case for
> > which we didn't have a name (although perhaps the grammarians did).
> > But it marked a case and was a complete word we put before the noun it
> > marked the case of, so we called it a preposition.

That's a misunderstanding. The fact that "throughout" marked a "case for
which we didn't have a name" indicates this. A case indicates the
relationship of a noun to the surrounding words *by inflection*. English
nouns don't *have* cases, unless you count the possessive, in which case it
has two, the nominative and the possessive. (For pronouns, add the object
case.) English nouns lack accusative, dative, vocative, ablative, etc.
cases, because English doesn't inflect nouns to indicate these kinds of
relationships between the noun and the rest of the sentence in which it
sits.

Somebody who made the above remark is someone (or got it from someone) who
learned that cases in *other* languages frequently express relationships
that English expresses with the prepositions, and thought that that meant
that the same case classification was applicable in English. The fact that
"we" don't have name for the "case" represented by "throughout" is that the
language the person was talking about (most likely German or Latin or maybe
Russian, since those are the case-bearing languages English speakers are
most likely to have learned) doesn't have a case that corresponds to
"throughout". *That* means neither that language *nor* English has such a
"case".

A language that uses a particular case may *also* use prepositions with the
noun in that case, and particular prepositions may go along with particular
cases. For example, as they say, in Latin "use the ablative with de, cum and
coram, ab and e, sine, tenus, pro and prae".

> >
> > Now come these two words, 'O' and 'Dear', and EK and others are saying
> > that they mark the vocative case. Okay, so English has a case I never
> > heard of.

Rest assured, it doesn't.

> No problem. But what are these words, 'O' and 'Dear'?

"O" is an interjection. "Dear" is an adjective.

> > They are case-markers that appear before the noun whose case they
> > mark. Does that make them prepositions?

No.

> They're certainly not nouns,
> > adjectives (or articles), verbs, adverbs, interjections, or
> > conjunctions, so what else can they be?

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