Declension (grammar)

In grammar, the term declension refers to a modification of certain classes of words (nouns, pronouns, adjectives, articles...) according to the syntactic function they fulfill in the sentence (that is,, the case) and other features, such as gender and number. This modification is analogous to what happens with verbs to indicate person, number, time, mode, etc., that is, the conjugation. In both cases the words are said to be inflected, altered, typically by affixation. Not all languages have inflection: in the case of Spanish, although there is verbal inflection or conjugation, the declension is only observed in personal pronouns (for example te, ti, contigo are declensions of the personal pronoun tú; or se, le, la, lo, are declensions of él, ella).

Grammatical case

A grammatical case indicates the function that a certain element fulfills in a sentence. In this way, for example, the nominative case indicates that an element fulfills the function of subject or attribute; similarly, the accusative or dative cases point to the direct object (element on which the action of the verb falls) or to the indirect object (element that indicates the addressee of the action), respectively. Other cases may indicate the possession of an element (genitive), its use (instrumental), its location (locative), among others.

In some languages cases are denoted by prepositional or postpositional constructions (e.g. in Spanish the preposition «de» is used to indicate possession of an object) or other mechanisms, while in other languages cases are indicated by declension. Languages such as Finnish or Hungarian use declension to indicate the function of the vast majority of the elements in the sentence, while languages such as German and Russian have a mixed use of declension and prepositional constructions to indicate this function (also using a combination between prepositions and declension to indicate the function of an element). Finally, there are languages in which the declension has a vestigial use (such as English, French or Spanish) and languages without any type of declension (such as Mandarin Chinese).

Types of declension

• (a) Nominal decline: corresponds to the forms of declination associated with substantives and their respective articles (in case there are the latter). Typical examples of nominal decline are found in classical languages such as ancient Greek (with articles) or Latin (without articles) and in living languages such as German (with articles) or Russian (without articles).
• (b) Pronominal decline: corresponds to the declination forms associated with pronouns. In many languages in which the nominal decline has disappeared, the pronominal decline is preserved in the case of personal pronouns such as in Spanish, French, Dutch, among many others. The English language retains pronominal declination in the case of personal pronouns and interrogatives.
• (c) Adjective decline: corresponds to the decline of the adjectives qualifiers of nouns subject to nominal decline. In general, this type of decline exists when there is nominal decline.
• (d) Numberary decline: In some languages, including most Slavic languages, there is a specific decline associated with numerals.

Examples

Latin

In Spanish, to distinguish between (1) The mother loves the son and (2) The son loves the mother

we are guided by the preposition “a” and, above all, by the order of the words: the usual thing is to put the subject before the verb and the object (also called the complement), after it. In Latin, the order of the words does not influence the meaning of the sentence; the subject is in the nominative case, the object in the accusative case:

(1) Mater filium amat = Filium mater amat (2) Matrem filius amat = Filius matrem amat

In Latin, nouns are inflected, that is, their endings vary depending on the case (there are six). The term declination is also used to refer to the paradigm, model or scheme by which inflections are governed. For example, the word filius is of the second declension (masculine) and has the following forms:

The word mater (Mater, Matris) belongs to the 3rd declension, that is, to another group of words that has different endings in each case. It is something similar to what happens in the Spanish language with the three conjugations (verbs ending in -ar, -er, -ir, which have different endings). In Spanish, only pronouns can be considered to be subject to morphological declension: We say he la loves , but he le gives a kiss

“la”, the direct object, would be in the accusative, and “le”, the indirect object, in the dative, if we follow the Latin grammar.

he hits her (a slap) but he hits her (label, with glue). Here le (which can be feminine or masculine: hitle him or her) is dative, and la accusative.

German

Also among the current languages there are many that are declined, for example German. In this language, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, etc. are inflected. but there are not as many different forms as in Latin: for example, sometimes the nominative of a noun coincides with its accusative, and there are only four cases. Where the declination is most appreciated is in the articles (which do not exist in Latin). Example:

(1) Right Hund beisst den Jungen. = Den Jungen beisst der Hund (the dog bites the boy)

(2) Der Junge beisst den Hund = Den Hund beisst der Junge. (The boy bites the dog.)

The masculine singular definite article is der in the nominative and den in the accusative. Junge inflects in the accusative, but Hund stays the same as in the nominative.

Languages with declension

Explicit marking of the morphological case or declension is frequent in the following families:

• Indo-European languages, especially old ones, but also a good number of modern ones. In these languages, case marks are usually fusing.
• Urálica, altaicas and draviadic languages, although here the case marks have an agglutinating character.

In declension, a distinction is usually made between argumentative cases, to designate the subject and the object, and oblique cases that designate other types of associated syntactic relationships, normally those attached to the verb or to the noun complements. In argumentative cases, the languages of the world are divided into several types according to their morphosyntactic alignment: nominative-accusative, absolutive-ergative, active-inactive, etc.

Languages with nominal inflection usually have number distinctions, and sometimes gender distinctions as well (although the latter is less frequent than number differences).

Indo-European Languages

Among the Indo-European languages that use declensions are German, Romanian, Greek, Icelandic, the Slavic languages (Polish, Russian,...), the Baltic languages (Latvian, Lithuanian...) and the Indo-Aryan languages.

In the Indo-European languages there are generally different paradigms for the declension of nouns and adjectives according to the ending or stem of the root. That is, depending on whether the stem ends in -a, -e, -i, -o, -u or a consonant, the declension pattern can have specific or slightly different forms for each ending. In addition, in the case of Indo-European languages, the declension varies according not only to the case, but also to gender and number. The pronouns for their part frequently have an idiosyncratic declension that does not depend on the subject or ending of the same.

These languages are in the category of fusions, which means that an affix is added to the head of the inflected word in which various grammatical functions are merged. In the same way as in Spanish, when conjugating a verb, we add an affix to the root that provides multiple information (viajaremos: the morpheme emos indicates first person plural and future tense), when declining a noun the ending indicates several functions, for example, in Latin, rosarum (of the roses) is feminine plural in the genitive case.

Other languages

Outside the Indo-European family, there are a large number of languages that decline, but in many cases they are not fusion languages, but agglutinative languages. The inflected words of these languages carry several affixes with a single meaning that must be placed in a certain place and each of which modifies, semantically or grammatically, the meaning of the lexeme. These include the Eurasian Turkic, the Eurasian Uralic, the Dravidian of the Indian subcontinent, and the Quechua languages of South America.