tion the mood of the City of Paris.
As we see, the five entries of nounal oblique cases in the German utterance (rendered through article inflexion), of which two are genitives, all correspond to one and the same indiscriminate common case form of nouns in the English version of the text. By way of further comparison, we may also observe the Russian translation of the same sentence with its four genitive entries: Висунення звинувачення проти вдови Капет здається бажаним, якщо врахувати настрій міста Парижа. p align="justify"> Under the described circumstances of fact, there is no wonder that in the course of linguistic investigation the category of case in English has become one of the vexed problems of theoretical discussion.
Four special views advanced at various times by different scholars should be considered as successive stages in the analysis of this problem.
The first view may be called the "theory of positional cases". This theory is directly connected with the old grammatical tradition, and its traces can be seen in many contemporary text-books for school in the English-speaking countries. Linguistic formulations of the theory, with various individual variations (the number of cases recognised, the terms used, the reasoning cited), may be found in the works of J. C. Nesfield, M. Deutschbein, M. Bryant and other scholars. p align="justify"> In accord with the theory of positional cases, the unchangeable forms of the noun are differentiated as different cases by virtue of the functional positions occupied by the noun in the sentence. Thus, the English noun, on the analogy of classical Latin grammar, would distinguish, besides the inflexional genitive case, also the non-inflexional, ie purely positional cases: nominative, vocative, dative, and accusative. The uninflexional cases of the noun are taken to be supported by the parallel inflexional cases of the personal pronouns. The would-be cases in question can be exemplified as follows. * p align="justify"> The nominative case (subject to a verb): Rain falls. The vocative case (address): Are you coming, my friend? The dative case (indirect object to a verb): I gave John a penny. The accusative case (direct object, and also object to a preposition): The man killed a rat. The earth is moistened by rain. p align="justify"> In the light of all that has been stated in this book in connection with the general notions of morphology, the fallacy of the positional case theory is quite obvious. The cardinal blunder of this view is, that it substitutes the functional characteristics of the part of the sentence for the morphological features of the word class, since the case form, by definition, is the variable morphological form of the noun. In reality, the case forms as such serve as means of expressing the functions of the noun in the sentence, and not vice versa. Thus, what the described view does do on the positive lines, is that within the confused conceptions of form and meaning, it still rightly illustrates the fact that the functional meanings rendered by cases can be expressed in language by other grammatical means, in particular, by word-order.
The second view may be called the "theory of prepositional cases". Like the theory of positional cases, it is also connected with the old school grammar teaching, and was advanced as a logical supplement to the positional view of the case. p align="justify"> In accord with the prepositional theory, combinations of nouns with prepositions in certain object and attributive collocations should be understood as morphological case forms. To these belong first of all the "dative" case (to + Noun, for + Noun) and the "genitive" case (of + Noun). These prepositions, according to G. Curme, are "inflexional prepositions", ie grammatical elements equivalent to case-forms. The would-be prepositional cases are generally taken (by the scholars who recognise them) as coexisting with positional cases, together with the classical inflexional genitive completing the case system of the English noun. p align="justify"> The prepositional theory, though somewhat better grounded than the positional theory, nevertheless can hardly pass a serious linguistic trial. As is well known from noun-declensional languages, all their prepositions, and not only some of them, do require definite cases of nouns (prepositional case-government); this fact, together with a mere semantic observation of the role of prepositions in the phrase, shows that any preposition by virtue of its functional nature stands in essentially the same general grammatical relations to nouns. It should follow from this that not only the of-, to-, and for-phrases, but also all the other prepositional phrases in English must be regarded as "analytical cases". As a result of such an approach illogical redundancy in terminology would arise: e...
