Kenneth G. Wilson (1923–). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993.
CASE 1
In English grammar, case is displayed in the distinctive inflectional form of a noun, pronoun, or adjective that indicates that word’s grammatical relationship to other words or parts of a locution. In Old English, all three parts of speech were inflected for the nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and (early in the period) instrumental cases. Today, only the personal pronouns show a fairly full range of distinctive case forms: nominative (I, you, he, she, it, we, you, they, who); genitive (my/mine, your/yours, his/his, her/hers, its/its, our/ours, your/yours, their/theirs, whose/whose); accusative (or objective) (me, you, him, her, it, us, you, them, whom). Gone are the distinctive inflections for the dative and instrumental, all covered instead today by the multipurpose objective case forms. In nouns, only the nearly all-purpose (e.g., dog/dogs) and the genitive (e.g., dog’s/dogs’) case forms still exist. In adjectives, case no longer appears in any inflections. Nevertheless, some grammars continue to refer to case, even where no formal, morphological indication of it appears, making case stand only for the grammatical function once indicated by form.
Where case inflections still exist today, and especially in the pronouns, they remain grammatically very powerful, and errors in their use are often serious blunders against Standard usage. Obvious inadvertent failures to meet Standard users’ expectations can have the force of shibboleths. But complicating the situation is the fact that in some instances case is currently in divided usage; see IT’S ME; WHO.
