Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics
case [Lat. casus ‘a fall,’ trans. of Grk 
‘a fall’]
Grammatical category of inflected words which serves to indicate their syntactic function in a sentence and, depending on the function, involves government and agreement. Case systems may vary from language to language and undergo continuous change. The cases of nominative languages are generally named after the reconstructed cases of Indo-European: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, locative, instrumental, vocative. In other languages, there are often other cases: in ergative languages ergative and absolutive are used instead of nominative and accusative; in Finno-Ugric languages, the terms partitive, elative, illative, inessive, among others, occur. In modern Indo-European languages, many of the original eight cases have disappeared, with original locatives, ablatives, instrumentals, and some genitives being replaced by the dative case or prepositional phrases. The merger of various cases due to sound change is termed syncretism. In inflectional languages, case is marked by grammatical morphemes which often have a variety of functions, such as marking gender and number. Adpositions, as in give to Caroline are occasionally referred to as case. In non-inflectional languages, where syntactic functions are primarily encoded by word order or sentence structure (e.g. English and French), attempts have been made to associate cases with specific syntactic positions. (
case theory, Government and Binding theory).
A general distinction can be made between (a) casus rectus (nominative) and oblique cases (genitive, dative, accusative, etc.), and (b) syntactic and semantic cases. The syntactic cases such as nominative and accusative encode primary syntactic functions such as subject and object and do not have any specific semantic function. On the other hand, cases like ablative, instrumental, and locative generally represent adverbials which have a more specific semantic content. In some languages (e.g. Turkish, Finnish, Russian) the use of cases is also sensitive to the definiteness and/or animacy of their constituents. Despite numerous attempts dating back to antiquity, there are as yet no satisfactory semantic classifications of individual cases.
References
Allen, C.L. 1995. Case marking and reanalysis. Grammatical relations from Old to Early Modern English. Oxford.
Blake, B.J. 1994. Case. Cambridge.
Brecht, R. and J.Levine (eds) 1987. Case in Slavic. Columbus, OH.
Comrie, B. 1991. Form and function in identifying cases. In F.Plank (ed.), Paradigms: the economy of inflection. Berlin. 41–56.
Gil, D.
1982. Case marking, phonological size and linear order. In J.P.Hopper and S.A.Thompson (eds), Studies in transitivity. New York.
Hjelmslev, L. 1935. La catégorie des Cas: étude de grammaire générale. Aarhus.
Jakobson, R. 1936. Beiträge zur allgemeinen Kasuslehre. TCLP 6. 240–88.
Kuryłowicz, J. 1964. The inflectional categories of Indo-European. Heidelberg.
Moravcsik, E.A. 1978. Case marking of objects. In J.H.Greenberg (ed.), Universals of human language. Stanford, CA. Vol. 4, 250–89.
Shibatani, M. 1983. Towards an understanding of the typology and function of case-marking. In S. Hattori and K.Inoue (eds), Proceedings of the thirteenth International Congress of Linguistics, Tokyo 1982. Tokyo. 45–58.
Van Kemenade, A. 1987. Syntactic case and morphological case in the history of English. Dordrecht.
Wierzbicka, A. 1980. The case for surface case. Ann Arbor, MI.
Yip, M., J.Maling, and R.Jackendoff. 1987. Case in tiers. Lg 63. 217–50.
Bibliography
Campe, P. 1994. Case, semantic roles, and grammatical relations: a comprehensive bibliography. Amsterdam.
2 Term for semantic role ( thematic relation), or ‘deep case.’ ( also case grammar)
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