Guide:Cases: Difference between revisions
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One of the first thing comes to mind when one hear about cases are which ones to pick from the {{lg|List of cases|huge list}} and the possible ones to make up. It depends strongely on what you are after, if its anything but natural you can pick and choose as you wish, it really doesn't matter. | One of the first thing comes to mind when one hear about cases are which ones to pick from the {{lg|List of cases|huge list}} and the possible ones to make up. It depends strongely on what you are after, if its anything but natural you can pick and choose as you wish, it really doesn't matter. | ||
But if you want natural the first thing to look up is {{lg| | But if you want natural the first thing to look up is {{lg|Morphosyntactic alignment}} because that choice will define what the central cases are. | ||
====Hierarchy==== | ====Hierarchy==== | ||
Latest revision as of 17:24, 18 February 2013
See also the guide on Nouns
Common Questions
What are cases?
Cases are a way to mark a noun for grammatical purposes within the sentence, to tell the listener what kind of information it is supplying to the over all picture and sentence.
Why would my language have it?
They are quite useful and offers a cheap and easy way to incorperate a huge quantity of information in a very small space of utterances.
How cases work
Which cases to choose
One of the first thing comes to mind when one hear about cases are which ones to pick from the huge list[*] and the possible ones to make up. It depends strongely on what you are after, if its anything but natural you can pick and choose as you wish, it really doesn't matter.
But if you want natural the first thing to look up is Morphosyntactic alignment[*] because that choice will define what the central cases are.
Hierarchy
After those one to three cases there are still plenty to pick from, you can have as many as 60 cases and more as some languages do. But cases in natural languages tend to exist in a hierarchy where the previous cases must exist for the following ones to exist aswell.
Grammatical Nominative Accusative Ergative Absolutive Ergative Intransitive Accusative Genitive Dative Locatives Motional Instrumental Adpositional Others
This hierarchy is by no means absolute or fixed but it is quite typical.
Marking of cases
Cases are typicly marked through either prefixes or suffixes[*] on the noun but any kind of affixation could be used and some languages uses particles to mark it instead, though they tend to be clitics then.