Questions tagged [cases]
Inflectional forms that indicate the grammatical functions of nouns, pronouns and their modifiers (such as adjectives).
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Do unschooled people use cases correctly, e.g. in Germany and in Russia?
I wonder if the case system is devised/imposed by literates and not really natural: it is said that the vulgar Latin that most people really used didn't have e.g. the cases (or all of them) of the '...
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How do linguists distinguish between case endings and postpositions, especially in languages which have both and/or have no traditional grammar?
In my attempt to learn Georgian, an agglutinative language of the South Caucasus, I have learned that it has both case endings and postpositions.
I also have some familiarity with Korean and Japanese ...
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What is "case"?
As a non-linguist, I am confused about the concept of case. What is its definition, as linguists use it? Is it about the different forms that nouns/pronouns can take? Is it about the function of the ...
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Is there a language known to have developed a case system?
There are many languages which, having descended from a language with a complex case system, have lost or greatly simplified theirs: Bulgarian (Slavic), English (Germanic), most Romance languages etc. ...
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Are there signed languages that have a case system?
In a prior question I asked whether word order in ASL has a special significance, which naturally lead to another question: do any signed languages, that is languages communicated mostly if not fully ...
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Are there any papers etc analyzing Japanese as a language with noun cases rather than particles?
Japanese is often included in lists of agglutinating languages.
Many (most?) agglutinating languages are analysed as having case systems.
Of course cases and prepositions/postpositions fill the same ...
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Are there any languages where the genitive case changes according to its object?
In forms like Claudio's house or Claudio's dogs, are there languages in which the Claudio's would change depending on gender and number of the houses or dogs?
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Do languages ever get new cases?
In my education, I've learned about a lot of languages whose case systems have atrophied, especially from PIE.
Wikipedia had a reference to The Evolution of Case Systems for Marking Event Structure, ...
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Declinable conjunctions
Duolingo states: “In German, conjunctions do not change with the case (i.e. they are not declinable).”1 I started to think of languages I know, and I don't remember any which would have this property.
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Languages preserving loanword inflections
Erudite English has an interesting practice where the plural form of loanwords may follow the inflectional grammar of the source language. Thus "campi" as well as "campuses", "minima" as well as "...
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Where did Latin and its descendants retain a case system most recently?
So we know that Latin nouns and adjectives inflect for case as well as person, number, and gender.
Also we know that all the major modern Romance languages except Romanian no longer have a case ...
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What is the origin of certain Hungarian suffixes?
I have a question about the etymology (within the Uralic family) of three Hungarian morphemes
Accusative -t- suffix: Hungarian has an accusative in -t- (eg. fiú, fiút), which has no cognates in any ...
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Vanishing of cases: general trend or specific to indo-European family?
Does vanishing of cases reflect a general trend across the languages or is this a false impression that one gets from the most Indo-European languages, like English and the Romance languages? A ...
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Why there are no grammatical cases in the French language?
As far as I know, the French language is considered as a Romance language, which is derived, in its turn, from the Latin language. The last one has a rich grammatical cases system.
I am interested to ...
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Are there any recent articles on the current state of Case theory?
Specifically I'm interested in the split between Structural Case and Morphological case.
Structural Case has been part of Chomskyan syntactic theory since at least Government & Binding (GB). ...
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Are there any languages with a case system like Esperanto's?
Thinking about Esperanto's case system, if I saw that in a natural language, I would think it was rather odd.
Esperanto only has two cases: accusative and non-accusative. The non-accusative, on is ...
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What are the subjective and objective genitives?
I have recently come across the terms subjective genitive and objective genitive, but I don't fully understand them.
From what I have read, an example might be 'the love of God', as in 'the love of ...
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Do languages with cases frequently have verbs which use particular cases for their objects?
Turkish, German, Russian, Greek and Latin are examples of languages with declension. They also have lists of verbs for which the verb's single object takes a particular case apart from the "normal" ...
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Indo-European languages that have innovated a nominative-accusative distinction for neuter nouns
One ubiquitous and ancient feature of Indo-European languages is a lack of contrast between the nominative and accusative for neuter nouns.
I'll restrict attention to nouns here and not independent ...
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Is there a name for the "case" that is a conflation of nominative and accusative?
In Indo-European languages, the neuter is often characterized by syncretism between nominative and accusative.
There are other examples of syncretism and also historical change where the nominative ...
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Declensions in Polish
Declension, as far as I know, corresponds to the act of creating boxes where you can pile up nouns that follow the same rule when inflected (generally due to cases). Classical Latin is often said to ...
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Thematic roles in some languages
I have a question about semantic roles in Latin and Russian.
Latin
Quibusdam […] sudor erumpit.
someone. DAT.PL sweat. NOM.SG come out.PRES.3SG.
‘Some people start sweating.’
...
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Does the Finnish translative case exist in other languages?
The Finnish translative case expresses the concept of becoming or turning into something else. Does this case exist in other languages, or is it unique to Finnish? How is this concept most commonly ...
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Are there languages with PCC effects and a more developed person system?
The Person-Case Constraint (PCC) is a constraint on which arguments can co-occur in a construction such as a causative/applicative/ditransitive. It might cause a combination of persons to be ...
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Why does "brother" have the instrumental case in this Polish sentence?
The instrumental case is used to indicate the instrument/object with which an action or state of being is performed. For instance, when you go to work "by car", car is instrumental because ...
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How dissimilar must case endings be to each other?
I'm asking this question for a conlang. I know that's normally too subjective for this forum, but honestly, I think this may be an exception.
I tend to try to keep things as terse as possible. Often ...
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Why are these Sanskrit words in the nominative case
I'm studying the Sanskrit mantra that starts with asato ma:
असतो मा सद् गमय asato mā sad gamaya
तमसो मा ज्योतिर्गमय tamaso mā jyotirgamaya
मृत्योर्मा अमृतं गमय mṛtyormā amṛtaṃ ...
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Why do two English personal pronouns — "you" and "it" — lack an objective case?
Most English person pronouns have an objective case — I/me, we/us, thou/thee, he/him, she/her, they/them, who/whom. But "you" and "it" have no such form. Did they every have one? ...
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Is it okay that Ergative case be unmarked?
I found a language of Celebes island in Indonesia, its name is Mongondow (mog). It has a Phillipine's Alignment morphosyntactic which it has combination of Accusative and Ergative languages. The word ...
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Vocatives and Case Assignment
Vocatives, which are basically nouns that refer to the person to whom the speech event is directed, are said to be detached from the sentences in which they occur.
Mary, I hate you.
I don't think I ...
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What is the difference between the nominative case and the subject?
I'm studying Japanese and recently I came across the term "double nominatives". The idea is that ga marks the nominative case, so a phrase with two ga has two phrases in the nominative case:
boku ga ...
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What is considered a grammatical case in the framework of turkic languages?
Let's take kazakh language as an example. In every source I've read there are 7 cases in kazakh language:
nominative üi - a house, baqşa - garden;
genitive üi-diŋ - of a house, baqşa-niŋ - of a ...
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Is the case described below hypothetical or does it occur in natural languages?
Suppose that you have a language, let's say it's SVO, has a clause pattern in which the subject typically stands for an agent or experiencer and the object typically stands for a patient or stimulus, ...
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How did Old Norse influence Old English to lose genders and cases?
Wikipedia says that "Norse influence is ... considered to have stimulated and accelerated the morphological simplification found in Middle English, such as the loss of grammatical gender and ...
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List of Hungarian toponyms by interior/surface case
Hungarian toponyms can be grouped grammatically according to whether they take the "interior" cases (inessive, illative, and elative) or the "surface" cases (superessive, sublative, and delative) to ...
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Is a final -u in Semitic languages known outside of Akkadian?
Consider Akkadian bētu vs. Hebrew bayit (בַּיִת) (meaning "house") and Akkadian daltu vs. Hebrew delet (דֶּלֶת) (meaning "door"). Are these endings known outside of Akkadian? If so, when did they ...
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What is the difference between case and adpositions?
The preposition expressions like "on top of the table", "under the tree", "above the building" are very well understood. Comparing these with the Germany noun cases "auf dem Tisch", "unter dem Baum", "...
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Is it possible in Sanskrit to distinguish between the names Rāma and Rām i.e. राम and राम् when used in a sentence?
Consider this sentence:
रामो लेखन्या लिखति
Is रामो in that sentence always referring to someone named राम (Rāma) or could it be equally possible that the person's name was राम् (Rām)? Are names like ...
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Can an object be in functional case A even though it's declined like case B?
Pardon my word choice, since I'm obviously lacking the background in linguistics. I know that language-specific questions are off-topic, yet I still like to use Finnish as an example, since it spawned ...
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What does 'overt NP' mean?
I just started studying syntax, and I am a little lost in terminology. Would someone please explain to me what does overt NP stand for?
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Are dative governing verbs in IE languages mainly inherited from PIE, or later developed within each IE language?
Some typical dative governing verbs in many IE case-inflecting languages are "help", "give" etc.. Are they mainly inherited from PIE or are they developed within each language? If ...
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Difference between Genitive Personal Pronoun and Possessive Pronoun
I'm currently studying Icelandic. Right away at one of the first steps I found a bit of difficulty and I wonder if any of you might be able to help me as the question might be answered based on any ...
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Instrumental - nominative inversion in Polish
While scrolling through a course in Polish, I saw the following sentence:
Wynikiem wyrażenia jest nowa relacja. -- *resultant (of the) expression is (a) new relation
This is not the first time I ...
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What would you call a case specifying something is far away from a noun?
There's the adessive case, which can be used to specify something is near a noun, but is there an opposite? Is there a case specifying a far distance from a noun? I'm including this case in my conlang ...
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The term for the state of a noun
In linguistics, a case is how a noun declines with respect to its grammatical function within a given phrase, clause, or sentence. Is there a linguistics term to refer to the “state” of a noun within ...
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What is "contacting case"?
According to Wikipedia, the Bats language of Eastern Georgia has a case called "contacting", but no description is offered as to its function.
I checked the Russian and Georgian versions of the page ...
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Do applicative verbs ever govern the cases of their objects?
From what I've read (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_case) applicative voice occurs when an oblique noun phrase becomes an argument of the verb when the verb takes some applicative morpheme....
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Are there any universals about how m-case can pattern for predicate NPs?
Predicate noun phrases (NPs) have different patterns of case in different languages.
Even closely related languages can show significant differences (Sigurðsson 2008). For example, among the Germanic ...
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As French is a so-called Roman language, where are the cases? [duplicate]
French language is known to be a Roman language, just like Spanish, Italian, Swiss Roman…
Those Roman languages are told to be originating from Latin language.
When I learnt Latin, one of the first (...
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Word for difference between "in" and "into"
I was wondering whether there are words for the two types of prepositions, or a word for the distinction between them. I understand that the difference between them is that one is a "static" ...
