Grammatical case

The number of cases differs between languages: Persian has three; modern English has three but for pronouns only; Torlakian dialects, Classical and Modern Standard Arabic have three; German, Icelandic, Modern Greek, and Irish have four; Albanian, Romanian and Ancient Greek have five; Bengali, Latin, Russian, Slovak, Kajkavian, Slovenian, and Turkish each have at least six; Armenian, Czech, Georgian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian and Ukrainian have seven; Mongolian, Marathi, Sanskrit, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Assamese and Greenlandic have eight; Old Nubian and Sinhala have nine; Basque has 13; Estonian has 14; Finnish has 15; Hungarian has 18; and Tsez has at least 36 cases.

[citation needed] Commonly encountered cases include nominative, accusative, dative and genitive.

More formally, case has been defined as "a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their heads".

Languages having cases often exhibit free word order, as thematic roles are not required to be marked by position in the sentence.

[1][6] The English word case used in this sense comes from the Latin casus, which is derived from the verb cadere, "to fall", from the Proto-Indo-European root ḱh₂d-.

This imagery is also reflected in the word declension, from Latin declinere, "to lean", from the PIE root *ḱley-.

The equivalent to "case" in several other European languages also derives from casus, including cas in French, caso in Italian and Kasus in German.

Similar to Latin, Sanskrit uses the term विभक्ति (vibhakti)[10] which may be interpreted as the specific or distinct "bendings" or "experiences" of a word, from the verb भुज् (bhuj)[11] and the prefix वि (vi),[12] and names the individual cases using ordinal numbers.

In Icelandic, articles, adjectives, personal names and nouns are all marked for case, making it the most conservative Germanic language.

Modern English has largely abandoned the inflectional case system of Proto-Indo-European in favor of analytic constructions.

For other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, grammatical function is indicated only by word order, by prepositions, and by the "Saxon genitive" (-'s).

Many forms of Central German, such as Colognian and Luxembourgish, have a dative case but lack a genitive.

The traditional case order (nom-gen-dat-acc) was expressed for the first time in The Art of Grammar in the 2nd century BC:

In Basque and various Amazonian and Australian languages, only the phrase-final word (not necessarily the noun) is marked for case.

In many Indo-European, Finnic, and Semitic languages, case is marked on the noun, the determiner, and usually the adjective.

In some languages, there is double-marking of a word as both genitive (to indicate semantic role) and another case such as accusative (to establish concord with the head noun).

catches mice(The) cat catches mice.СтолбStolb-∅pillar-NOM.INANдержитdérzhitholdsкрышуkrýshu.roofСтолб держит крышуStolb-∅ dérzhit krýshu.pillar-NOM.INAN holds roof(The) pillar holds a/the roof)vs. ПётрPyotrPeterгладитgláditstrokesкотаkot-ácat-ACC.ANПётр гладит котаPyotr gládit kot-áPeter strokes cat-ACC.ANPeter strokes a/the catand ПётрPyotrPeterломаетlomáyetbreaksстолбstolb-∅pillar-ACC.INANПётр ломает столбPyotr lomáyet stolb-∅Peter breaks pillar-ACC.INANPeter breaks a/the pillarAustralian languages represent a diversity of case paradigms in terms of their alignment (i.e. nominative-accusative vs. ergative-absolutive) and the morpho-syntactic properties of case inflection including where/how many times across a noun phrase the case morphology will appear.

For typical r-expression noun phrases, most Australian languages follow a basic ERG-ABS template with additional cases for peripheral arguments; however, many Australian languages, the function of case marking extends beyond the prototypical function of specifying the syntactic and semantic relation of an NP to a predicate.

[24] Dench and Evans (1988)[25] use a five-part system for categorizing the functional roles of case marking in Australian languages.

Each of the case markers functions in the prototypical relational sense, but many extend into these additional functions: Wanyjirra is an example of a language in which case marking occurs on all sub-constituents of the NP; see the following example in which the demonstrative, head, and quantifier of the noun phrase all receive ergative marking: yalu-ngguDIST-ERGmawun-duman-ERGgujarra-lutwo-ERGngu=wulaREAL=3.AUG.SBJyunbarn-anasing-PRESjunbacorroboree.ABSyalu-nggu mawun-du gujarra-lu ngu=wula yunbarn-ana junbaDIST-ERG man-ERG two-ERG REAL=3.AUG.SBJ sing-PRES corroboree.ABSThose two men are singing corroboree.However, this is by no means always the case or even the norm for Australian languages.

For many, case-affixes are considered special-clitics (i.e. phrasal-affixes, see Anderson 2005[26]) because they have a singular fixed position within the phrase.

The oblique case is used exclusively with these 8 case-marking postpositions of Hindi-Urdu forming 10 grammatical cases, which are: ergative ने (ne), dative and accusative को (ko), instrumental and ablative से (se), genitive का (kā), inessive में (mẽ), adessive पे (pe), terminative तक (tak), semblative सा (sā).

[32] lar̥kā per̥ lar̥kī mātā lar̥ke lar̥kiyã mātaẽ lar̥kõ per̥õ lar̥kiyõ mātāõ mātāo ma͠i ham tū tum āp ma͠ine hamne tūne tumne āpne mujhe hamẽ tujhe tumhẽ āpko mujh ham tujh tum āp mujhī hamī̃ tujhī tumhī̃ āp hī ye vo jo kaun, kyā yah ye vah ve isne inhõne usne unhõne jisne jinhõne kisne kinhõne ise inhẽ use unhẽ jise jinhẽ kise kinhẽ is in us un jis jin kis kin isī inhī̃ usī unhī̃ jis bhī jin bhī kisī kinhī̃ An example of a Latin case inflection is given below, using the singular forms of the Latin term for "cook", which belongs to Latin's second declension class.

Typically in Lithuanian, only the inflection changes for the seven different grammatical cases: Hungarian declension is relatively simple with regular suffixes attached to the vast majority of nouns.

vṛkṣ-ātfrom the treeparṇ-ama leafbhūm-auon the groundpatatifallsvṛkṣ-āt parṇ-am bhūm-au patati{from the tree} {a leaf} {on the ground} fallsHowever, the cases may be deployed for other than the default thematic roles.

In traditional analyses, there is always a clear distinction made between post-positional morphemes and case endings.

[40][41] In English, apart from the pronouns discussed above, case has vanished altogether except for the possessive/non-possessive dichotomy in nouns.

Languages can then compensate for the resulting loss of function by creating postpositions, thus coming full circle.

Recent experiments in agent-based modeling have shown how case systems can emerge and evolve in a population of language users.