Delahunty and Garvey
You will no doubt have noticed that there are two genitive forms of cer-
tain pronouns, such as my and mine. The forms corresponding to my (your,
our, their) are used when they directly modify a noun. Otherwise we use the
other genitive forms: That is my horse as opposed to That horse is mine. The
former are sometimes misleadingly referred to as possessive adjectives, as
they occur before the nouns they modify in the positions believed (wrongly)
to be typical of attributive adjectives. The latter are often distinguished as
possessive pronouns because they appear to replace possessive nouns or
noun phrases, e.g., compare That bike is hers with That bike is Kelly’s.
English nouns functioning as heads of subjects do not differ in form from
nouns functioning as heads of objects, so we do not distinguish between
nominative and objective cases in those instances. Grammarians occasion-
ally refer to the nominative/objective form of nouns as the common case.
Earlier forms of English, the classical languages (Latin and Greek), and
modern languages such as Finnish have much more elaborate case distinc-
tions than modern English. Table 2 provides a list of some traditional case
names and their functions.
name grammatical function
Nominative subject
Objective object
Genitive modifier, complement
Dative recipient, beneficiary
Ablative place from where
Vocative addressee
table 2: traditional case names and functions
Many languages require case markings on parts of speech besides nouns
and pronouns. Modern German, for instance, makes case differentiations
on both articles and adjectives.
Gender of personal pronouns
The pronoun system of English distinguishes three genders: masculine
(forms of he), feminine (forms of she), and neuter (not neutral!) (forms of
it), distinguished primarily according to the nature of the objects they refer
to. Masculine pronouns refer to males, primarily human males; feminine
pronouns refer to females, primarily human females; and neuter pronouns
refer either to non-human animals or to entities that are non-animate and
consequently are not differentiated according to sex. Infants whose sex is