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In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun indicates its grammatical function in a greater phrase or clause; such as the role of subject, of direct object, or of possessor. While most languages distinguish cases in some fashion, it is only customary to say that a language has cases when these are codified in the morphology of its nouns — that is, when nouns change their form to reflect their case. (Such a change in form is a kind of declension, hence a kind of inflection.) Cases are related to, but distinct from, thematic roles such as agent and patient; while certain cases in each language tend to correspond to certain thematic roles, cases are a syntactic notion whereas thematic roles are a semantic one.
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Cases are not very prominent in modern English, except in its personal pronouns (a remnant of the more extensive case system of Old English). For other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, case is indicated only by word order, by prepositions, and by the clitic -'s.
Taken as a whole, English personal pronouns are typically said to have three morphological cases: a subjective case (such as I, he, she, we), used for the subject of a finite verb and sometimes for the complement of a copula; an objective case (such as me, him, her, us), used for the direct or indirect object of a verb, for the object of a preposition, for an absolute disjunct, and sometimes for the complement of a copula; and a possessive case (such as my/mine, his, her(s), our(s)), used for a grammatical possessor. That said, these pronouns often have more than three forms; the possessive case typically has both a determiner form (such as my, our) and a distinct independent form (such as mine, ours). Additionally, except for the interrogative personal pronoun who, they all have a distinct reflexive or intensive form (such as myself, ourselves).
While not very prominent in English, cases feature much more saliently in many other Indo-European languages, such as Latin, Greek, German, Slavic. Historically, the Indo-European languages had eight morphological cases, though modern languages typically have fewer, using prepositions and word order to convey information that had previously been conveyed using distinct noun forms. The eight historic cases are as follows, with examples:
All of the above are just rough descriptions; the precise distinctions vary from language to language, and are often quite complex. Case is arguably based fundamentally on changes to the ending of the noun to indicate the noun's role in the sentence. This is not how English works, where word order and prepositions are used to achieve this; as such it is debatable whether the above examples of English sentences can be said to be examples of 'case' in English.
An example of a Latin case inflection is given below, using the singular forms of the word homo (man), which belongs to Latin's third declension.
Grammatical case was analyzed extensively in Sanskrit, where it is known as karaka. Six varieties are defined by Pāṇini, largely in terms of their semantic roles, but with detailed rules specifying the corresponding morphosyntactic derivations:
For example, consider the following sentence:
| vrikśh[at] | parṇ[am] | bhūm[au] | patati |
| [from] the tree | a leaf | [to] the ground | falls |
| "a leaf falls from the tree to the ground" | |||
Here leaf is the agent, tree is the source, and ground is the locus, the corresponding declensions are reflected in the morphemes -am -at and -au respectively.
Languages with rich nominal inflection typically have a number of identifiable declension classes, or groups of nouns that share a similar pattern of case inflection. While Sanskrit has six classes, Latin is traditionally said to have five declension classes. Such languages often exhibit free word order, since thematic roles are not dependent on position.
Though English pronouns can have subject and object forms (he/him, she/her), nouns show only a singular/plural and a possessive/non-possessive distinction (e.g., chair, chairs, chair's, chairs'). Note that chair does not change form between "the chair is here" (subject) and "I saw the chair" (direct object). The n-declension is restricted to a few words like ox-oxen, brother-brethren, and child-children, though in Medieval English the s-declension and the n-declension were in stronger competition.
Languages are categorized into several case systems, based on their morphosyntactic alignment — how they group verb agents and patients into cases:
The following are systems that some languages use to mark case instead of, or in addition to, declension:
Some languages have very many cases; for example, Finnish has fifteen (see Finnish language noun cases) and Tsez can even be analyzed as having 126 cases.
In Indo-European languages, each case often contains several different endings, some of which may even be derived from different roots. An ending is chosen depending on gender, number, whether the word is a noun or a modifier, and other factors.
The lemma forms of words, which is the form chosen by convention as the canonical form of a word, is usually the most unmarked or basic case, which is typically the nominative, trigger, or absolutive case, whichever a language may have.
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