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I'm absolutely confused when it comes to cases in English, and more so when I'm studying other languages (leisurely). I've tried to learn cases at least three times in my life and every time it just slips my mind because it's so confusing for me.

Is there any online tool (probably using AI) that highlights the case of each word in a sentence/string? If there truly isn't, what online learning resource can you recommend for me to learn cases (in all languages) as efficiently as possible?

Even better, can someone give a succinct introductory overview here?

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  • Is grammatical case the same as part of speech?
    – George White
    Commented Oct 18, 2022 at 19:30
  • 1
    What do you mean?
    –  printerprinter1555
    Commented Oct 18, 2022 at 19:50
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    English has no cases. Cases are nominative, dative, ablative and so forth.
    – Lambie
    Commented Oct 18, 2022 at 20:13
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    I am telling you again: English does not have cases. Cases refer to the suffix inflections of nouns in languages. Here is an example of first-declension nouns in Latin. Look at the endings in the chart. Those are appended to the noun. booksnbackpacks.com/latin-cases-for-beginners Cases are different in all languages. You are ,misusing the term. And in nouns: the change the meanings. For the boy, of the boy, the boy, to the boy.
    – Lambie
    Commented Oct 18, 2022 at 21:09
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    In "He ate the apple", "apple" isn't accusative or objective case, it's just a regular unmarked noun. There seems some dispute over whether English pronouns have cases or inflectional forms, but it's reasonable to say "he" is nominative (aka subjective). In contrast, it's presumably possible to create a tool for Russian or Latin that would tell you which of the 6 or so cases each noun was in, and if you know or want to learn those languages, it would be interesting and maybe useful (although some languages case-mark articles not nouns). But that's off-topic for an English language group.
    – Stuart F
    Commented Oct 19, 2022 at 16:16

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Hi printerprinter1555,

I am going to follow conventions from the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (if needed, this gives you an overview, section 7 is most relevant for you) in this post. Please bear in mind that there are various accepted ways of analyzing the English Language.

As the Modern English language is quite analytic in nature, it does not have a very elaborate case system anymore. Whereas Old English nouns had four to five different cases, in Modern English there are only two cases for nouns: The genetive (most commonly used to indicate posession or some kind of belonging, easy to identify because it has the 's or s' ending) and the plain case (used for everything else).

English personal pronouns have five different inflectional forms:

  1. nominative (e.g. I, she, we)
  2. accusative (e.g. me, her, us)
  3. dependent genitive (e.g. my, her, our)
  4. independent genitive (e.g. mine, hers, ours)
  5. reflexive (e.g. myself, herself, ourselves)

I think it would be sufficient to keep in mind that nouns are always in plain case unless they have the genitive marker 's or s', and to memorize the different cases for each personal pronoun. So at least for English, there is no need for an automatic classifier. However, I suspect that you might be interested in syntax trees and the different levels of language analysis (esp. syntax and morphology).

Concerning the Wikipedia page about cases you gave in a comment to the original question, I think I should clarify that the examples given in the "Example" column would be better described as "illustrations" or "paraphrases". They are multi-word translations of circumstances that can be expressed by just one word in the respective case of the origin language (the origin language is indicated in the "Found in" column). In English, a paraphrase is needed because the language does not have these special cases, so a single-world translation is not possible.

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  • I was about to CV this question as not fitting the ELU template. But this frame-challenge answer is very important and useful.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Mar 26 at 12:55

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