HERE’S a basic grammar question that baffled an adequately English-savvy friend of mine: Why are the nominative case and subjective case lumped as just a single case in English? Plus the objective case and possessive case, shouldn’t there be four cases in all?

To answer my friend’s question, I came up with this simplified layperson’s definition of case: it is the form a noun or pronoun takes to indicate its functional relationship to other words in a sentence or clause. In modern English, there are indeed only three cases—the nominative or subjective, classified as just a single case, when the noun or pronoun acts as the subject of a sentence or clause; the objective case, when the noun or pronoun receives the action of the verb or is the object of a preposition; and the possessive case, when the noun or pronoun shows possession of something.

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