declension

[dih-klen-shuhn]

declension: see inflection.

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In linguistics, declension (or declination) is the occurrence of inflection in nouns, pronouns and adjectives, indicating such features as number (typically singular vs. plural), case (subject, object, and so on), or gender. Declension occurs in a great many of the world's languages, and features very prominently in many European languages, but is much less prominent in English; English nouns only decline to distinguish singular from plural (e.g. book vs. books), English adjectives almost never decline at all (the French loan-word blond(e) being a rare exception), and only a few English pronouns show vestiges of case-triggered declension (e.g. subjective he vs. objective him).

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.) Additionally, a small number of English pronouns have distinct subjective and objective forms; that is, they decline to reflect their relationship to a verb or preposition. (Consider the difference between he and him, as in "He saw it" and "It saw him.") Further, these pronouns and a few others have distinct possessive forms, such as his. (By contrast, nouns do not have distinct possessive forms; rather, the clitic -'s attaches to a noun phrase to indicate that it serves as a possessor.)

Historically, English had a much richer system of declension. First, there were a few more grammatical cases; Modern English's objective case results from a merging of Old English's accusative, dative, and instrumental cases (like a message, him, and post in "I sent a message to him via post", respectively). Second, the distinction between these cases was visible in all nouns, not just certain pronouns. (Indeed, the modern clitic -'s descends from an affix used to mark Old English's genitive case, the ancestor of Modern English's possessive pronoun forms.) Third, adjectives were declined to reflect the number and case of the nouns they modified; this is called agreement, and is analogous to conjugation of verbs in Modern English. (Consider the difference between "I read" and "He reads"; here, read has changed form to agree with its subject.) Fourth, every noun had a gender, either masculine, feminine, or neuter, which was reflected (via agreement) in adjectives that modified it and pronouns that had it as antecedent. (There were some further complications as well; for example, adjectives had both weak declensions and strong declensions. For more information, see Old English morphology.)

Latin

An example of a Latin noun declension is given below, using the singular forms of the word homo (man), which belongs to Wiktionary Appendix:Latin third declension.

homo (nominative) "[the] man" [as a subject] (e.g. homo ibi stat the man is standing there)
hominis (genitive) "of [the] man" [as a possessor](e.g. nomen hominis est Claudius the man's name is Claudius)
homini (dative) "to [the] man" [as an indirect object] (e.g. homini donum dedi I gave a present to the man; homo homini lupus est Man is a wolf to man.)
hominem (accusative) "[the] man" [as a direct object] (e.g. ad hominem toward the man, in the sense of argument directed personally; hominem vidi I saw the man)
homine (ablative) "[the] man" [in various uses not covered by the above] (e.g. sum altior homine I am taller than the man).

There are two further noun declensions in Latin, namely the vocative and the locative. The vocative is widely used in Latin and refers to addressing someone or something (e.g. O Tite, cur servam pugnas? O Titus, why do you fight the slave girl?) The locative case is only rarely used in Latin, but refers to the location of a person or an object.

Sanskrit

Declension has been analyzed extensively in Sanskrit, where it is known as karaka. Six varieties are defined by Pāṇini, largely in terms of their semantic roles, but with detailed rules specifying the corresponding morphosyntactic derivations:

agent (often in the subject position, performing independently)
patient (often in object position)
means (instrument)
recipient (similar to dative)
source (similar, but not the same, as ablative)
locus (location or goal)

For example, consider the following sentence:


[from] the tree	a leaf	[to] the ground	falls
"a leaf falls from the tree to the ground"

Here leaf is the agent, tree is the source, and ground is the locus, the corresponding declensions are reflected in the morphemes and respectively.

Languages with rich nominal inflection typically have a number of identifiable declension classes, or groups of nouns that share a similar pattern of declension. While Sanskrit has six classes, Latin is traditionally said to have 5 declension classes (see article on Latin declension). Such languages often exhibit free word order, since thematic roles are not dependent on position.

Though English pronouns can have subject and object forms (he/him, she/her), nouns show only a singular/plural and a possessive/non-possessive distinction (e.g., chair, chairs, chair's, chairs'). Note that chair does not change form between "the chair is here" (subject) and "I saw the chair" (direct object). The n-declension is restricted to a few words like ox-oxen, brother-brethren, and child-children, though in Medieval English the s-declension and the n-declension were in stronger competition.