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Concerning the Number of Cases in Modern English
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In his recently published Philosophy of Grammar, Professor Otto Jespersen devotes Chapter XIII to the discussion of “Case.” And, as in every former work from his pen, in this latest he is highly interesting and instructive. And yet I find myself unable to agree with several positions taken therein, especially in the chapter on Case.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1927
References
1 The Philosophy of Grammar, Lond. and N. Y., 1924, pp. 173-187.
2 According to J. E. Wülfing (Die Syntax in den Werken Alfreds des Grossen, I, 473), ascian (acsian) sometimes takes a genitive of the thing and an accusative of the person, sometimes an accusative of the thing and an accusative of the person. According to Henry Sweet in his Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, ascian regularly takes two accusatives. Bosworth-Toller's Anglo-Saxon Dictionary cites one or two examples in which the pronoun indicating the person may be considered a dative. Wülfing (op. cit., I, 225) tells us that hatan, ‘call,’ usually has two accusatives. Occasionally we seem to have a nominative instead of the second (predicative) accusative, possibly out of confusion with the synthetic passive, hatte, ‘is called,’ ‘was called.’
3 The Latin is quoted from Wordsworth and White's Nouum Testamentum Latine, editio minor, Oxford, 1911.
4 Of course, the noun for ‘son‘ in Old English, being a u-stem, ended in -a, not in -e, in the dative singular. But this -a became -e in Middle English.
5 See the writer's “The Dative of Time How Long in Old English,” Mod. Lang. Notes, XXXVII (1922), 129-141.
6 A New English Grammar (I, Oxford, 1892, §114; II, Oxford, 1898, §§1985-1995).
7 See the Collected Papers of Henry Sweet, arranged by H. C. Wyld, Oxford, 1913, p. 27
8 This address was delivered before the Annual Conference of the English Association on May 27, 1922, at Bedford College, and was published along with other papers in the English Association Pamphlet No. 56, The Problem of Grammar, July, 1923.
9 Since writing the above statement I have read Dr. Mawer's review of Mr. Jespersen's Philosophy of Grammar, in The Review of English Studies (I, 223-227), which review confirms the inference here drawn from Mr. Mawer's essay.
10 See the writer's “The Present-day Attitude toward the Historic Study of the Mother-tongue,” in the University of Texas Studies in English, No. 5, 1925, p. 46.
11 The Committee, on p. ix of its Report (revised edition, Washington, D. C., 1923), warmly recommends the use of the term descriptive for adjectives and for clauses, but strangely enough does not use the term at all in treating (on pp. 8 and 30) of Genitive Case-uses.
12 In “The Present-day Attitude toward the Historic Study of the Mother-tongue,” pp. 39-67, especially pp. 63-67 (in the University of Texas Studies in English, No. 5, 1925).