VerifiedHint: In a sport like football or volleyball, some team positions like the forwards, midfielders and goalkeepers hold special responsibilities. If we replace the sports with grammar, then the team positions will be replaced by grammatical cases. Cases are words that tell us about the important positions of words in a sentence. They can be nouns, pronouns etc.
Complete answer:
1. Here we are going to check each option one by one so that we can detect the correct option containing the case of the underlined noun.
2. The nominative case symbolizes the subject of a sentence. It refers to the subject that performs an action (or receives the action, when the sentence is in passive voice). We can see that in the sentence given to us in the question, the underlined phrase ‘the boy’ is the subject of the sentence. Thus, it is the nominative case.
3. The objective case refers to the word/phrase that receives an action (in a sentence in active voice). It is the word that is the object of a sentence. Here, in this question, the phrase 'glass of water' receives the action 'drank' and not 'the boy'. Thus, this option is not correct.
4. The third option- Possessive case expresses ownership of something like a word. In this question, the underlined phrase, ‘the boy’ does not express any ownership. Hence, this option is not correct.
5. Apposition is a grammatical construction where any two phrases are placed together. Here, one of the elements serves to identify the other in a different way. For example, please note this sentence: ‘This is, my son, Lorenzo’. Here, ‘my son’ is in apposition with ‘Lorenzo’. But in the question, the underlined phrase ‘the boy’ is not in apposition with any other phrase. Thus, this option is also incorrect.
Therefore, the correct answer to this question is option A.
Note: In linguistics, ‘Case’ is defined as the grammatical function of a noun or pronoun. It has only three modifications in modern English. They are subjective, objective and possessive cases.
