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This page pertains to UD version 2.

Case: case

Definition

Case is an inflectional feature for nouns, pronouns, adjectives and numerals in Estonian.
Estonian has 14 inflectional cases:
nominative
genitive
partitive
illative (+ additive)
inessive
elative
allative
adessive
ablative
translative
terminative
essive
abessive
comitative

Nom: nominative / direct

The base form of the noun, typically used as citation form (lemma). In many languages this is the word form used for subjects of clauses. If the language has only two cases, which are called “direct” and “oblique”, the direct case will be marked Nom.

Examples

Gen: genitive

Prototypical meaning of genitive is that the noun phrase somehow belongs to its governor; it would often be translated by the English preposition of. English has the “saxon genitive” formed by the suffix ‘s; but we will normally not need the feature in English because the suffix gets separated from the noun during tokenization.

Note that despite considerable semantic overlap, the genitive case is not the same as the feature of possessivity (Poss). Possessivity is a lexical feature, i.e. it applies to lemma and its whole paradigm. Genitive is a feature of just a subset of word forms of the lemma. Semantics of possessivity is much more clearly defined while the genitive (as many other cases) may be required in situations that have nothing to do with possessing. For example, [cs] bez prezidentovy dcery “without the president’s daughter” is a prepositional phrase containing the preposition bez “without”, the possessive adjective prezidentovy “president’s” and the noun dcery “daughter”. The possessive adjective is derived from the noun prezident but it is really an adjective (with separate lemma and paradigm), not just a form of the noun. In addition, both the adjective and the noun are in their genitive forms (the nominative would be prezidentova dcera). There is nothing possessive about this particular occurrence of the genitive. It is there because the preposition bez always requires its argument to be in genitive.

Examples

Par: partitive

In Finnish the partitive case expresses indefinite identity and unfinished actions without result.

Examples

Ill: illative

The illative case expresses direction into something.

Examples

Add: additive

Distinguished by some scholars in Estonian, not recognized by traditional grammar, exists in the Multext-East Estonian tagset and in the Eesti keele puudepank. It has the meaning of illative, and some grammars will thus consider the additive just an alternative form of illative. Forms of this case exist only in singular and not for all nouns.

Examples

Ine: inessive

The inessive case expresses location inside of something.

Examples

Ela: elative

The elative case expresses direction out of something.

Examples

All: allative

The allative case expresses direction to something (destination is adessive, i.e. at or on that something).

Examples

Ade: adessive

The adessive case expresses location at or on something. The corresponding directional cases are allative (towards something) and ablative (from something).

Examples

Note that adessive is used to express location on the surface of something in Finnish and Estonian, but does not carry this meaning in Hungarian.

Abl: ablative

Prototypical meaning: direction from some point.

Examples

Tra: translative / factive

The translative case expresses a change of state (“it becomes X”, “it changes to X”). Also used for the phrase “in language X”. In the Szeged Treebank, this case is called factive.

Examples

Ter: terminative / terminal allative

The terminative case specifies where something ends in space or time. Similar case in Basque is called terminal allative (Spanish adlativo terminal).

Examples

Ess: essive / prolative

The essive case expresses a temporary state, often it corresponds to English “as a …” A similar case in Basque is called prolative and it should be tagged Ess too.

Examples

Abe: abessive

The abessive case corresponds to the English preposition without.

Examples

Com: comitative / associative

The comitative (also called associative) case corresponds to English “together with …”

Examples


Case in other languages: [am] [apu] [arr] [bej] [bg] [cs] [el] [eme] [en] [es] [ess] [et] [fi] [ga] [gn] [grc] [gub] [hu] [hy] [ka] [kmr] [koi] [kpv] [ky] [mdf] [myu] [myv] [pcm] [pt] [qpm] [ru] [sl] [sv] [tl] [tpn] [tr] [tt] [u] [uk] [urb] [urj]