Rude, Carolyn and Angela Eaton. (2011) Technical
Editing. 5th ed. The Allyn & Bacon Series in Technical
Communication. Boston: Longman (an
imprint of Pearson Higher Ed.).
In this lesson, here is the headnote for students to read before listening to the song and reading my essay:
First, make sure your computer's speakers are working, and listen to the sound clip of my idol --when I was eleven-- Jim Morrison of The Doors. Try to pay careful attention to the lyrics. Then, let's read about grammar. After the show, scroll down past Jim and click on the link to the grammar lesson.
Yes, there is a reason--try to trust me here. If you know the song, or if you don't have time to listen to the whole 3:14 -minute clip, at least listen through the first whole performance of the song's refrain.
Link to the song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PECk9A-07Pw
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Overview of the Indo-European Case System in Five Minutes
or
Why I Had to Break Up with Jim Morrison
First, case applies to nouns, to their modifiers (adjectives), and to their substitutes (pronouns). Philologists maintain that way back in the olden days the Indo-European language—the one that must have been the common ancestor of all the main languages English derives from—had eight cases. Some aspects of the case system survive in modern English. I am telling you about them because the whole concept helped me understand why the English language works the way it does. Here are the eight:
Nominative
Genitive
Dative
Accusative
Ablative
Instrumental
Locative
Vocative
Way back in the day, English had what many European and other languages have to this day: endings on their nouns, pronouns, and adjectives to signify their function in the sentence. These endings, when applied to nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, are called “declensions,” and if a word takes different forms according to its function in a sentence, we would say it “declines.” This action corresponds to “conjugations” in verbs; verbs “conjugate.” I wish, he wishes….etc. (present tense); I wished, he wished, etc. (past tense). Each form of the verb has an ending signifying the verb’s function. The general term for the endings on words is inflections.
Many European languages still have significant declension of nouns and adjectives.
Except for a few places, like noun plurals and possessives, English nouns and adjectives don’t really decline much anymore. Instead, most case work is done by prepositions. If we know which preposition governs a noun, we can determine its function in the sentence.
Here are the eight cases with their characteristics:
Nominative: cognate with Latin “nomen,” “name.” A thing needs a name, and we remember that the one thing, or noun, needed in a sentence is the subject. The nominative case, therefore, is the subjective case. Because the subject is the leader of the sentence, it has no preposition to govern it. It is just there.
Genitive: cognate with “engender,” to be born or to grow out of. Look at that word “of” and there is your key. The Grapes of Wrath, the Queen of England, Milk of Magnesia. The driver of the car. This case is our possessive, and in the Anglo-Saxon times it had the declension ending –es. Now we see that genitive case ending survive in the possessive apostrophe + s ending: England’s Queen, the car’s driver.
Dative: cognate with Latin “dare,” “to give” and its past participle, “datum” (plural “data”; we know this word). We give things to people; we do things for people. Two prepositions that govern the dative case in English are “to” and “for.” We call this the indirect object. “I wrote a letter to my friend.” “I brought ice cream for my students.”
Accusative: the direct object. In the example above, there is a straight line from the verb to this object; no preposition intervenes. The direct objects are “letter” and “ice cream.” With the direct object, the speaker hits the wall. He does not hit on the wall, to the wall, in the wall, or of the wall. Just direct—bam! No preposition. Consider the “transitive” verbs that Carolyn Rude has been writing about. A transitive verb slams right into the direct object, with no preposition. (By the way, a transitive verb needs to be followed by something and can’t be the end of the thought).
Ablative: cognate with Latin ab + latus, the past participle form of “fero,” cognate with English “bear,” to carry, like a flag bearer, or Aquarius, the Water-Bearer. The prepositional prefix “ab” means “from” or “down from” or “away from.” We use the ablative case to indicate something being carried, or moving, away from something else. “The English professor from Hell….”
Instrumental: No, it is not the version of the song without the words, the ring tone. It does imply agency, the instrument by which something is performed. “I fixed the hole with Scotch tape or by means of Scotch tape.” “He led the dog out by its collar.”
Locative: you know the word “location, and maybe the Latin word “locus.” It denotes a place. Some European languages have prepositions or declensions that distinguish “place toward which” or “into” from “place in which.” “He is at home.” “He is going home.”
Vocative: cognate with Latin “vocare,” to call. There was a whole separate case just for addressing someone, though sometimes the form was similar to the nominative. “Oh, Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?” (Janis Joplin). There is no preposition, just the interjection, “oh.” “Hey! You! Get offa my cloud!” (Rolling Stones). This sentence combines the vocative and the ablative.
Now, here is the fun part; it has to do with pronoun use. Pronouns are one part of speech that still decline in English, and pronoun errors are common for some English speakers because people don’t know the cases. In the Technical Editing textbook (5th ed), Rude and Eaton address “pronoun case errors” in Chapter 10, pages 140 and 146.
So if anyone listening to Jim Morrison did not catch his glaring error at first, maybe that person will notice it after applying a rule of prepositions to the pronouns in the song “Touch Me.”
In English, it is fairly simple. The subject pronoun has one form, and the genitive has its own form, and most of the other cases have combined into a third, all-purpose object form. That’s it; only three. Sometimes the object pronoun is the same as the subject (“you”).
Subjects: I, you, he/she/it, we, you, they
Possessive: my, your, his/ hers/ its, our, your, their
Other objects, direct or indirect: me, you, him/her/it, us, you, them
Little kids make the mistake of using the object pronoun when they should use the subject: “Me and Maggie rode our bikes to the store.” Someone corrects the little kid who utters this sentence, “Maggie and I rode our bikes….”
“The man at the store gave Maggie and I some ice cream.”
Should the correcting adult be proud now? No! In the first sentence, “Maggie and I” were the subject of the sentence, so the correct pronoun is the subjective pronoun “I.” In the second sentence, Maggie and the speaker are the indirect object of the sentence (preposition “to” implied, dative case). “The man at the store gave [to] Maggie and me some ice cream.” If the speaker were at the store alone, she would say, “gave me,” not “gave I.” The correct pronoun is determined by the function in the sentence of the noun it replaces.
So imagine anyone’s horror when Jim sings,
…Till the stars fall from the sky
For YOU AND I.
If a pronoun follows a preposition, then it can’t be a SUBJECT pronoun, but would have to be an OBJECT pronoun. Only object pronouns can follow a preposition.
What is a preposition? According to my 11th grade English teacher, it is everywhere a cat goes: above, under, over, to, from, around, between…. etc.
Sorry, Jim, too bad you had to die, but it’s OVER.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -APPENDIX: here is the quick list, repeating what is in your textbook but with prepositions:
Subject: no preposition, subject pronoun (I, you, he/she/it, we, they)Possessive (genitive): of + object pronoun (me, him/ her/it, us, them)
(without the preposition, use the possessive adjective: my, your, his/ hers/ its, our, your, their)
English also has a possessive pronoun: mine, yours, his/hers/its, ours, yours, theirs
Direct object: no preposition, object pronoun (me, you, him/ her, us, them)
Indirect object: to or for, object pronoun (me, you, him/ her/ it, us, them)
Survivals of the ablative: from, object pronoun (me, you, him/ her/ it, us, them)
Survivals of the instrumental functions, with, by, object pronoun (me, you, him/ her/ it, us, them)
…and so on.
Laura Gabiger 2012
