case

case in language, one of the several possible forms of a given noun, pronoun, or adjective that indicates its grammatical function (see inflection ); in inflected languages it is usually indicated by a series of suffixes attached to a stem, as in Latin amicus, "friend" (nominative); amicum (accusative); amici (genitive); and amico (ablative and dative). In modern English, nouns are marked for two cases—common or nominative (e.g., man ) and possessive or genitive ( man's ). A few pronouns are marked for three—nominative (e.g., he ), objective or accusative ( him ), and possessive ( his ). Old English also inflected for accusative, dative, and sometimes instrumental, cases. In Latin, six cases are indicated by changes in inflection—nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, and vocative. The hypothetical ancestor of the Indo-European languages used eight cases, the above six plus the instrumental and locative cases. The Altaic and Finno-Ugric language families also use case-marking systems. German uses four cases, Russian six, Finnish sixteen. In Europe, the concept was first introduced by the Greeks, although Sanskrit grammarians established it independently. The names of the most common cases derive from Greek by way of Latin translation, as does the term case itself.

case Any single unit selected for observation or analysis by a researcher. For example, in a study of the division of household tasks among eighty couples, each couple would constitute a separate case. Similarly, in a sample survey, individual respondents or interviewees are cases. Cross-national comparative analysis might feature nations as cases. In contingency tables, the total number of cases is conventionally indicated by a lower-case letter n, as in ‘n = 1,350’.

CASE Acronym for computer-assisted software engineering. A marketing term, used to describe the use of software tools to support software engineering. There are two distinct classes of CASE, referred to as lower CASE and upper CASE. Lower CASE generally supports the programming aspects of the development life cycle and here the term is synonymous with programming support environment (PSE). Upper CASE is used to describe tools that support methods used earlier in the life cycle to elicit or record user requirements, software (or system) requirements, and design.