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In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number (at least singular and plural), case (nominative or subjective, genitive or possessive, etc.), and gender. A declension is also a group of nouns that follow a particular pattern of inflection. Declension occurs in many of the world's languages, and features very prominently in many European languages. Old English was a highly inflected language, as befits its Indo-European and especially its Germanic linguistic ancestry, but its declensions greatly simplified as it evolved into Modern English. ==Modern English== In Modern English, nouns have distinct singular and plural forms; that is, they ''decline'' to reflect their grammatical number; consider the difference between ''book'' and ''books''. In addition, a few English pronouns have distinct nominative (also called subjective) and oblique (or objective) forms; that is, they decline to reflect their relationship to a verb or preposition, or case. Consider the difference between ''he'' (subjective) and ''him'' (objective), as in "He saw it" and "It saw him"; similarly, consider ''who'', which is subjective, and the objective ''whom''. Further, these pronouns and a few others have distinct possessive forms, such as ''his'' and ''whose''. By contrast, nouns have no distinct nominative and objective forms, the two being merged into a single ''plain case''. For example, ''chair'' does not change form between "the chair is here" (subject) and "I saw the chair" (direct object). Possession is shown by the clitic ''-'s'' attached to a possessive noun phrase, rather than by declension of the noun itself. Gender is at best only weakly grammaticalized in Modern English. While masculine, feminine, and neuter genders are recognized, nouns do not normally decline for gender, though some nouns, especially Latin words and personal names, exist in multiple forms corresponding to different genders: alumnus (masculine singular) and alumna (feminine singular); Andrew and Andrea, Paul and Paula, etc. Suffixes such as ''-ess'', ''-ette'', and ''-er'' can also derive overtly gendered versions of nouns, with marking for feminine being much more common than marking for masculine. Many nouns can actually function as members of two genders or even all three, and the gender classes of English nouns are usually determined by their agreement with pronouns, rather than marking on the nouns themselves. Adjectives are rarely declined for any purpose. They can be declined for number when they are used as substitutes for nouns (as in, "I'll take the reds", meaning "I'll take the red ones" or as shorthand for "I'll take the red wines", for example). Also the demonstrative determiners ''this'' and ''that'' are declined for number, as ''these'' and ''those''. Some adjectives borrowed from other languages are, or can be, declined for gender, at least in writing: ''blond'' (male) and ''blonde'' (female) or a ''bonie'' lad as compared to a ''bonnie'' lass. Adjectives are not declined for case in Modern English, though they were in Old English. The article is never regarded as declined in Modern English, although formally, the words ''that'' and possibly ''she'' correspond to forms of the predecessor of ''the'' (''se'' m., ''þæt'' n., ''sēo'' f.) as it was declined in Old English. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「declension」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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