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Case is a grammatical category whose value reflects the grammatical function performed by a noun or pronoun in a phrase, clause, or sentence. In some languages, nouns, pronouns, and their modifiers take different inflected forms depending on what case they are in. English has largely lost its case system, although case distinctions can still be seen with the personal pronouns: forms such as ''I'', ''he'' and ''we'' are used in the role of subject ("I kicked the ball"), while forms such as ''me'', ''him'' and ''us'' are used in the role of object ("John kicked me"). Languages such as Ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hungarian, Tamil, Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Slovak, Finnish, Icelandic, Latvian and Lithuanian have extensive case systems, with nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and determiners all inflecting (usually by means of different suffixes) to indicate their case. A language may have a number of different cases (Romanian has five, Latin and Russian each have at least six; Polish, Czech, and Serbo-Croatian, Latvian and Lithuanian have seven; Finnish has 15, Hungarian has 18). Commonly encountered cases include nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive. A role that one of these languages marks by case will often be marked in English using a preposition. For example, the English prepositional phrase ''with (his) foot'' (as in "John kicked the ball with his foot") might be rendered in Russian using a single noun in the instrumental case, or in Ancient Greek as τῷ ποδί ''tōi podi'', meaning "the foot" with both words (the definite article, and the noun πούς ''pous'', "foot") changing to dative form. As a language evolves, cases can merge (for instance in Ancient Greek genitive and dative have merged as genitive), a phenomenon formally called syncretism.〔Clackson (2007) p.91〕 More formally, case has been defined as "a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their heads."〔Blake, Barry J. ''Case''. Cambridge University Press: 2001.〕 Cases should be distinguished from thematic roles such as ''agent'' and ''patient''. They are often closely related, and in languages such as Latin several thematic roles have an associated case, but cases are a morphological notion, while thematic roles are a semantic one. Languages having cases often exhibit free word order, since thematic roles are not required to be marked by position in the sentence. ==Etymology== The English word ''case'' used in this sense comes from the Latin ''casus'', which is derived from the verb ''cadere'' "to fall", from the Proto-Indo-European root '. The Latin word is a calque of the Greek ''ptosis'', lit. "falling, fall".〔"L. cāsus used to translate Gr. lit. `falling, fall'. By Aristotle was applied to any derived, inflected, or extended form of the simple or (i.e. the nominative of nouns, the present indicative of verbs), such as the oblique cases of nouns, the variations of adjectives due to gender and comparison, also the derived adverb (e.g. was a of ), the other tenses and moods of the verb, including its interrogative form. The grammarians, following the Stoics, restricted to nouns, and included the nominative under the designation". 〕 The sense is that all other cases are considered to have "fallen" away from the nominative. This picture is also reflected in the word ''declension'', from Latin ''declinere'', "to lean", from the PIE root '. The equivalent to "case" in several other European languages also derives from ''casus'', including ''cas'' in French, ''caso'' in Spanish and ''Kasus'' in German. The Russian word падеж ''padyezh'' similarly contains a root meaning "fall", and the Czech "pád" simply means "fall", and is used for both the concept of grammatical case and to refer to physical falls. The Finnish equivalent is ''sija'', which can also mean "position" or "support". 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「grammatical case」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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