Advanced Grammar Topics: Grammatical Cases Part 3

Written by Blackkdark on 11th July 2007

In a previous article, I wrote about the four more essential noun cases.  Here, I will talk about some of the more advanced ones.  Unfortunately, I haven't studied enough languages, or even so intensely to have a full list of noun cases.  So, if one of the cases you are looking for isn't discussed here, then a good place to look might be here.

The first case I will talk about here is one of my favourites: Vocative.  The vocative case is used exclusively when one is adressing another.  This case I know is Romanian and in Latin.  A famous example from Latin actually comes from Shakespeare.  The character Brutus is given the standard nominative ending -us.  However, after Caeser is stabbed, he turns to Brutus and says, "Et tu, Brute?" (and you, Brutus?).  The -e ending is very vocative.  It is used for statements of address.

Locative, which is often merged with Vocative due to a similar ending, shows a location.  It could go along with say "at" "by" or "near" a place.

Ablative is the last of Latin cases (along with the essential four).  It is described as a motion from case, so it shows things moving away from another thing.  It is also used in prepositional phrases so be aware for that.  It could also deal with things of noun, or even along with.

The Instrumental case is used in Russian, and probably in some of the Slavic languages.  It answers the questions of with what is something done.  It portrays this. 

The Prepositional case uses pretty much certain prepositionals to mark this case.   This could be seen as similar to the Spanish/Italian habit of having a different prepositional pronoun (Spanish forms mí versus me, tí versus te, etc).  This one is fairly simple to see, but one must memorize which prepositions, or worse yet, in which case in certain prepositons.

Some call the mixture of the Dative and Accusative cases, the Objective case.  This is what one calls the Object pronouns in English or Norwegian, since there are no real changes from direct to indirect case.

Some cases dive into semantics and pragmatics (not to be explained here), but one must see them to understand them.