The word case has a lot of meanings in English language like an occurrence of a specific situation, instance of a disease or injury, a legal action or a container. All of these meanings are very common and you would probably have heard about them at some point of your life.
Today I will talk about another case which you might have not heard about before and which is very different from the rest of its meanings. This case is also referred to as grammatical case as it is related to English grammar. Let’s dig in.
Case
When one grammar term pertains its reference or relationship with another grammar term in the same sentence, the relationship is termed as case. Grammatical case is usually apply on nouns and pronouns in a sentence.
In simpler terms, a noun’s or pronoun’s case is that particular noun’s or pronoun’s relationship to other words in the sentence.
Example:
Olivia read the newspaper quietly.
She read the newspaper quietly.
Note that Olivia and she is the same person so there is a relation between Olivia and the rest of the sentence which is termed as case.
There are four different types of grammatical cases in English language which are termed as Subjective case, Objective case, Possessive case and Vocative case.
Subjective Case
When a noun or pronoun is a subject of a verb in the sentence, the case is called subjective case.
The above example is the simplest example of subjective case. In the above example Olivia is the main subject of the verb read so it a subjective case.
Objective Case
When a noun or pronoun is an object of the verb in a particular sentence, their relationship is termed as objective case.
Example
She ate crabs.
In this example, crabs is the object and it has a direct relationship to verb ate, so this is an objective case.
Possessive Case
A case is a possessive case when the relationship is refers to shows possession. The possession is usually shown by the use of an apostrophe.
Example
This is Adam’s book.
The use of apostrophe with an s in the above sentence shows that the book belongs to Adam which determines its possession thus a possessive case.
Vocative Case
When in a sentence, a proper noun or a name of a person is directly addressed; the sentence is an example of vocative case.
Example:
Sara, is that you?
Notice that the person is directly called upon in this example; hence it is a vocative case.
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