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302 CHAPTER 17 154 Cases of nouns, review Nouns in English essentially have two forms, singular and plural. The possessive form, expressed by ‘s, is also used in certain instances, but as many English speakers are uncertain as to its correct usage (especially in writing), it can no longer be viewed as a central part of the English noun system. In BCS, by contrast, each noun can express seven different case meanings in both singular and plural (with an additional form used after the numbers 2, 3, 4). To function effectively within BCS, it is crucial to know not only the different case forms a noun can take, but also when each should (or can) be used. The set of these case forms is called a declensional paradigm. The basic paradigms of BCS are by now familiar (review [89]). In a number of instances, the same case form carries more than one meaning; the meanings, however, remain separate. Each preposition requires the noun or pronoun which follows it to be in a particular case. Most prepositions have more than one meaning: sometimes they require the same case no matter what the meaning, and sometimes they require a different case depending on the meaning. The following reviews the usage of the different cases, with and without prepositions. 155 The nominative and vocative cases The nominative and vocative cases often share the same form. Their functions are quite different, however. As their names indicate, the nominative case names something, and the vocative case serves to call someone. The nominative is the case form under which nouns are listed in the dictionary, and the form one uses to identify a noun. 155a. The nominative case The nominative case (review [20]) expresses the ideas subject and predicate noun. A subject heads a sentence, and requires the verb to agree with it. A predicate noun follows a form of the verb biti, which itself follows the subject of the sentence. The nominative case can also express the predicate after the verbs zvati “call”, značiti “mean”, postati “become”, praviti se “pretend to be”, and a few others; the instrumental can also be used in certain of these contexts (see [159a]). If a title of a book or institution is used in apposition to another noun (review [121a]), that title is in the nominative regardless of the case of the other noun. If a noun is presented as equivalent to another noun in the nominative, usually after connectives such as kao or nego, it also appears in the nominative case. Prepositions are in general not used with the nominative . An exception is the preposition po in its meaning of distribution or succession (review [59c, 124d]): unlike most instances of preposition usage, which require a specific case for a specific meaning, the preposition po – in this meaning only – takes whatever case the sentence meaning requires. The pronominal adjective svoj expresses possession, and specifically indicates that the possessor is the grammatical subject of the sentence. In normal usage, therefore, one would not be able to use svoj in the nominative case, since the identities of possessor and that which is pos- CHAPTER 17 303 sessed cannot logically be one and the same. In more metaphorical usage, however, svoj can modify a noun in the nominative case. In this usage, it means one’s own either in the sense of being autonomous and independent, or in the sense of being part of a group considered as one’s own. In the second usage, context is of course critical in order to define the group in question. The nominative subject of a BCS sentence is not always translated as an English subject. English sentences almost always place the subject before the verb. In BCS, however, the verb frequently precedes the subject. This places more emphasis on the verb than on the subject, and such emphasis is frequently translated by another phrase altogether in English. NOMINATIVE J nasljednici / E naslednici; J svjetski / E svetski; E posle / J poslije; E predsednik / J predsjednik; S,B u preduzeću / C,B u poduzeću; J podsjetnik / E podsetnik; C,B mogla bi proći / B,S mogla bi da prođe; J čovjek / E čovjek 155b. The vocative case The vocative case (review [19, 88]) is used to attract someone’s attention, or to indicate the addressee of a particular statement. For many nouns, the form of the vocative is identical to the nominative. When it does take a separate form, however, this...

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