Not a single word of the Russian language in a sentence can exist independently. In order for a statement to make sense, there must be a connection between all its parts. It is this connection that is called syntactic, which is formed using the case system of the Russian language. There are ten such cases in total, but six are taught at school, but in simple speech they are all used in full, although they have a controversial case status.
Role of cases
How is the connection of words in a sentence formed? What parts of speech are inflected? How are new word forms formed? How to put questions between the members of the proposal? What are the case questions of adjectives, nouns and other parts of speech? These and many other topics related to this section of the Russian language are taught in schools starting from the third grade. In Russian, the following parts of speech change, or decline according to cases: noun, pronoun, adjective and numeral. Moreover, this is expressed in a change in the ending. And in order to determine the case of any of the words, a case question is posed to it.
In fact, learning to understand this topic is not at all difficult. To do this, children are offered interesting and even funny rhymes, each word of which begins with a capital letter of the list of cases. For example: Ivan gave birth to a girl and ordered to drag the diaper.
Case system of the Russian language
Depending on the functions performed, the noun can change in cases. This process is called declension, and it is thanks to it that the words in the sentence have a syntactic role and connection with each other. Otherwise it would be just a vocabulary list. Here are the case questions of the Russian language, which determine the role of the noun in the sentence:
Nominative, or Im. p. - master, house - who? what?
Genitive, or R. p. - masters, at home - whom? what?
Dative, or D. p. - to the master, to the house - to whom? what?
Accusative, or V. p. - masters, house - whom? what?
Creative, or Etc. - master, house - by whom? what?
Prepositional, or P. p. - about the master, about the house - about whom? about what?
All cases, except for the nominative, have the name "indirect" and can be used with or without a preposition (it is this service part of speech that serves to clarify the meaning of the word). The only exception here is the prepositional case, which is one of the entire list used exclusively with a preposition.
The acquaintance of schoolchildren with this system begins each time according to the same scheme: first, the children are offered to determine the case question by selection, then the name of the case is voiced, and incompletion the role of the word in the sentence, namely, which member of the sentence it is, main or secondary.
Nominative
The main distinguishing feature here is that the word in the singular in the nominative case is always the initial form. In a sentence, whether singular or plural, such words always act as the grammatical basis, namely the subject.
For example: "A boy (case question - who?) goes (what does he do?) to school." Here the phrase "the boy is walking" is the grammatical basis, and the word "boy" is in the nominative case.
But it is simply impossible to make such a sentence, where the subject is not in the nominative case.
Genitive
The big difficulty here is that the table of case questions has similar interrogative words, in particular, this applies to the genitive and accusative cases. And here suggestions come to the rescue. So, the prepositions “without”, “y”, “to”, “from”, “from”, “for” are used only with words in R. p. As a rule, they are included in the question itself.
For example:
- "Walks without slippers (without what?)".
- "Fish soup (from what?)".
- "The girl came from her grandmother (from whom?)."
Dative
Here the definition of the form of the word is a bit simpler, but there are both case and semantic issues. What does this mean?
For example: "Children are jumping down the corridor (what? - case question; where? - semantic)".
It is very important to distinguish these typesquestions, because, using the semantic form, it will not be possible to correctly determine the case.
It is also worth noting that the preposition "to" is used only with D. p., while "by" can occur with V. p., and with D. p., and with P. p..
Accusative
This case form can also be a bit tricky because of the questions that define it. Because they are similar to the nominative and dative cases.
For example, you can take an interesting sentence that sounds like this:
"The mouse saw the mouse." – We are talking about a mouse that saw a mouse, but which of the words will be the subject? If we supplement this sentence, we get: "The mouse saw a mouse, a chicken and a duck." It immediately becomes clear which of the words is part of the grammatical basis. That is why in Russian most often the subject comes before the predicate. So, it is clear that one of the words is in I. p., but how to determine the form of the second? Is it R. p. or V. p.? And again we need to turn to reasoning. Here you should not take the words out of context, you need to put the question directly from the predicate: - “The mouse saw (whom? What?) The mouse.”
The following prepositions are used with words in the accusative case: “about”, “through”, “through”, “on”.
Instrumental
As a rule, the words used in the instrumental case are directly related to the predicate and are used with the prepositions "above" and "with". Therefore, first the grammatical basis is distinguished in the sentence, and then the case form of the secondary members is determined. However, it also happens thatthe sentence may be with an incomplete grammatical basis. And here it is important to catch a possible predicate from the context. For example: “A squirrel is friends with a bump, a cat with a mouse, and a bunny with grass.”
The basis of the sentence "the squirrel is friends", "the cat" and "the bunny" - from the context it is clear that in all parts of this sentence one predicate can be used - "friends". We put from him the question "with whom?". Case questions are answered by the word “with a mouse” and the word “with weed”.
Prepositional case
This case has its own peculiarities: words are not used here without prepositions. There are also semantic questions that need to be learned to weed out. For example:
- "The boy drew (where? in what?) a tree in the album."
- "Cucumbers grow (where? on what?) in the garden."
- "Wolves are found (where? in what?) in the forests."
The question is always put together with the preposition used in the sentence.
Other cases
In addition to the six main cases that are included in the school curriculum, there are so-called additional cases.
- Vocative, or vocative. As a rule, this form is used when referring to a person. For example: Anya is Im.p., and An is vocative. This case is not at all newly formed, and its forms have been preserved from ancient times until today in the words “Lord, God”, “older”, “father”, and so on.
- Quantitative-separative, paritive, or second genitive. As a rule, at school, all forms of this case are classified as genitive.
- Local, or locative. Thisthe form is often replaced by a prepositional case, but in some cases they can be separated. For example: “about the closet” - about what? and "in the closet" - where?
- Original, or ablative. In this case, the noun denotes the place of the beginning of the action or movement and is distinguished from the local only by an accent. For example: “I came out of the forest.”
Special attention is paid to the study of this material in the school curriculum. And this is understandable: knowing the subtleties of the relationship of words in a sentence, you can be sure of the literacy of speech, the correctness of all endings. This will avoid many blunders both in speaking and writing, which is very important in our time of education and great technology.
