The Category of Case in English and Albanian Nominal System: A Contrastive Analysis

Agnesa Çanta

doi:10.5539/ijel.v7n1p226

Abstract

The grammatical category of case, as one of the most discussed grammatical categories in English and one of the most specific categories in Albanian, has always attracted the researchers’ attention and, therefore, there are numerous studies about this category in these two respective languages. However, the main purpose of this article is to indicate that despite their different morphological structure which implies differences in their grammatical categories, English and Albanian, also show some similarities that concern the grammatical category of case and especially the genitive case as the only marked case in English nominal system. This article examined the grammatical category of case in English and Albanian nominal system through the contrastive method, emphasizing the differences that regard several aspects of the category of case, such as the number of cases in these two languages, the way they build their case forms, the use of prepositions in building the case forms, i.e., prepositions as case markers, and also several characteristics of the category of case that these two languages have in common. The results indicate that the similarities concern mainly the genitive case. Nouns in the genitive case, in English and Albanian, share some characteristics that concern their semantic functions, their use in “the double genitive” constructions, rules of forming such constructions, and the omission of the case markers without affecting meaning.

Highlights

Case is usually defined as a grammatical category of nouns manifested in different forms of nouns depending on their syntactic functions, namely, their relations with other words in the sentence
The first difference concerns the number of cases
This study examined the grammatical category of case in English and Albanian nominal system, highlighting the differences and similarities that concern different aspects of the grammatical category of case in these two languages

Summary

Introduction

Case is usually defined as a grammatical category of nouns manifested in different forms of nouns depending on their syntactic functions, namely, their relations with other words in the sentence. According to Whitman (1975), supporters of this theory are mainly prescriptive grammarians who considered Latin an ideal language and used it to describe the grammatical systems of other languages They claim that English nouns generally have 6 cases: 1) Nominative Case—the house. Bashkëshortja e Gjonit është mësuese e gjuhës angleze As seen in these examples, unlike Albanian nouns, English nouns retain the same form when used as a subject, a direct object and an indirect object, respectively in the nominative and the objective case, the term “plain case”, whereas they change the form only in the genitive case. The postpositional theory rejects all other theories claiming that English nouns do not have the category of case because they have lost it during the historic development of the language (Iliysh, 1971). Iriskulov (2006, p. 21) claims that one of the fiercest supporters of this theory Vorontsova shares Iliysh’s view and treats the [-s] morpheme of the genitive case as a “postposition”, “a purely syntactical form—word resembling a preposition”, used as a sign of syntactical dependence

The Category of Case in English Nominal System

The Common Case

The Genitive Case

The Category of Case in Albanian Nominal System

The Nominative Case

The Dative Case

The Accusative Case

The Ablative Case

Conclusion