Table of Contents
Cases
General
- a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their heads
- A role that one of these languages marks by case will often be marked in English using a preposition.
- Languages having cases often exhibit free word order, because thematic roles are not required to be marked by position in the sentence
- case is a morphological category
Nominative
subject pronoun
Accusative
object pronoun, ‘to’
Genitive
possessive and ‘of’
Instrumental (ablative, творительный)
‘by’, ‘via’, ‘with’
hierarchy
Cases can be ranked in the following hierarchy, where a language that does not have a given case will tend not to have any cases to the right of the missing case:[4]:p.89
nominative → accusative or ergative → genitive → dative → locative or prepositional → ablative and/or instrumental → others.
This is, however, only a general tendency.
related [[study]]