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.

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