Guide:Cases

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.