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Questions tagged [cases]

Inflectional forms that indicate the grammatical functions of nouns, pronouns and their modifiers (such as adjectives).

Case is a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their heads. Traditionally the term refers to inflectional marking, and, typically, case marks the relationship of a noun to a verb at the clause level or of a noun to a preposition, posposition or another noun at the phrase level.

Source: Case.

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How does 'like a book' befit the Translative, and not Essive, Case?

McWhorter, J. PhD Linguistics (Stanford). The Language Hoax (2016). p. 56 Bottom. I speak no Estonian. 1. But how does the preposition 'like' conveys the Translative Case? E.g., an encyclopedia looks 'like a book', but encyclopedias are not…
user5306
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Global case map

A lot of European languages, especially Finnish (not an INDO European language) have cases. English for the most part doesn’t. Other languages don’t. I have seen maps of grammar features around the world. Is there one for grammatical case? And, are…
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Are there languages in which overt morphological accusative case is obligatory on the second conjunct of a conjunction?

For example: (1) The officer believed [NP Mary and me] Of course, the distribution of ACC pronouns in English doesn't really map onto ACC in overt morphological case languages.
Jeremiah Cashore
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What is the difference between Arabic forms and cases?

Every word in Arabic derives from 3 root letters. Forms in Arabic are a way of modifying these roots to create new words whose meaning is based on the original one. For example, one might turn a verb like "help" into the verb "cooperate", which…
Stan Shunpike
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Is Finnish harder than Latin?

I'm not interested in learning Finnish, but I do have some interest in Latin. I suspect that this is the case (no pun intended) because Latin only has 5 cases (plus a 6th that is used sparingly), but Finnish, on the other hand, has 15. I find this…
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Why is it OK to claim that a language "has no grammatical cases"?

My question is a direct consequence of this question and its answers and comments. What completely baffles me (as a non-linguist) is the claim (decision? definition?) that there can be a language on Earth (at least, the most used languages and…
virolino
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Are there other languages, besides Latin, where a gender of a noun is determined by its genitive case ending?

Are there other languages, besides Latin, where a gender of a noun is determined by its genitive case ending?
user24185