Essive case

Last updated

In grammar, the essive case, or similaris case, (abbreviated ESS) is a grammatical case. [1] The essive case on a noun can express it as a definite period of time during which something happens or during which a continuous action was completed. It can also denote a form as a temporary location, state of being, or character in which the subject was at a given time. The latter meaning is often described as the equivalent of the English phrase "as a __". [2]

Contents

Finnish

In Finnish, it is marked by adding "-na/-nä" (depending on the vowel harmony) to the stem of the noun. [2]

Examples:
lapsi "child" → lapsena "as a child", "when (I) was a child".
Veljeni on säveltäjänä "My brother is a composer (at somewhere or a certain kind of)."
cf: Veljeni on säveltäjä (Nom) (My brother is a composer) vs. Veljeni on säveltäjänä (Ess) (My brother works/acts as composer (somewhere))
säveltäjä "composer" → säveltäjänä "state of being a composer (the given time is the present)" [2]
Example: 'Veljeni on säveltäjänä orkesterissa "My brother is a composer in an orchestra".
Example: 'Veljeni on säveltäjänä ainutlaatuinen "As a composer my brother is unique".

In Finnish, the essive case is technically categorized as an old locative case, a case that, in some way, indicates spatial location. However, in the present language, the case has lost the majority of its spatial meaning. The case instead typically denotes a state that is temporary or inclined to change. [2]

Some fixed expressions retain the essive in its ancient locative meaning, however: "at home" is kotona.

Example: Luen lehtiä kotona. "I read newspapers at home."

If the inessive were used, kodissani, it would distinguish the activity from reading the papers, such as in the garage or in the garden (of the home).

The essive case is also used in a temporal sense with certain nouns, notably the names of weekdays, and vuosi (year), aamu (morning), ilta (evening), and yö (night), as well as dates. [2]

viime maanantaina "(on) last Monday."
kuudentena joulukuuta "on 6 December".
tänä päivänä "on this day"
viime vuonna "(during) last year"

When marking something that cannot literally change states, the essive case can implicate the presence of alternative states, even two individual, differing "worlds". [3] That can be seen in the following example:

Example: Ostin helmen aitona. "I bought the pearl thinking it was genuine [but later found out that it was not]." [3]

The example above illustrates the process by which marking of the essive case can be seen as creating two differing "worlds": one real and one illusionary. The "temporary" component of the meaning encoded by marking of the essive case on the Finnish word for "genuine" (aito) makes a distinction between the perceived state of the subject, as genuine at the time of purchase, and the actual state of subject, as not genuine as it is now perceived or at the time of the moment of speech. [3]

Estonian

In Estonian, it is marked by adding "-na" to the genitive stem. [4] Marking of the case in Estonian denotes the capacity in which the subject acts. The essive case is used for indicating "states of being" but not of "becoming", which is instead marked by the translative case, the elative case, or the nominative case. [4]

Examples:

laps

"child"

→

 

lapse

"of child"

→

 

lapsena

"as a child", "when (I) was a child"

laps → lapse → lapsena

"child" {} {"of child"} {} {"as a child", "when (I) was a child"}

Ta töötab insenerina "He works as an engineer." [4]

Further reading

See also

Related Research Articles

In linguistics, declension is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and articles to indicate number, case, gender, and a number of other grammatical categories. Meanwhile, the inflectional change of verbs is called conjugation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Genitive case</span> Grammatical case

In grammar, the genitive case is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can also serve purposes indicating other relationships. For example, some verbs may feature arguments in the genitive case; and the genitive case may also have adverbial uses.

A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nominal groups consisting of a noun and its modifiers belong to one of a few such categories. For instance, in English, one says I see them and they see me: the nominative pronouns I/they represent the perceiver and the accusative pronouns me/them represent the phenomenon perceived. Here, nominative and accusative are cases, that is, categories of pronouns corresponding to the functions they have in representation.

In grammar, the illative case is a grammatical case used in the Finnish, Estonian, Lithuanian, Latvian and Hungarian languages. It is one of the locative cases, and has the basic meaning of "into ". An example from Hungarian is a házba. An example from Estonian is majasse and majja, formed from maja ('house'). An example from Finnish is taloon, formed from talo, another from Lithuanian is laivan formed from laivas ('boat'), and from Latvian laivā formed from laiva ('boat').

In grammar, an adessive case is a grammatical case generally denoting location at, upon, or adjacent to the referent of the noun; the term is most frequently used in Uralic studies. In Uralic languages, such as Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian, it is the fourth of the locative cases with the basic meaning of "on"—for example, Estonian laud (table) and laual, Hungarian asztal and asztalnál. It is also used as an instrumental case in Finnish.

In grammar, the translative case is a grammatical case that indicates a change in state of a noun, with the general sense of "becoming X " or "change to X ".

In grammar, the prolative case, also called the vialis case, prosecutive case, traversal case, mediative case, or translative case, is a grammatical case of a noun or pronoun that has the basic meaning of "by way of" or "via".

In grammar, the locative case is a grammatical case which indicates a location. It corresponds vaguely to the English prepositions "in", "on", "at", and "by". The locative case belongs to the general local cases, together with the lative and separative case.

Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Southern Sámi</span> Endangered Uralic language of Scandinavia

Southern or South Sámi is the southwesternmost of the Sámi languages, and is spoken in Norway and Sweden. It is an endangered language; the strongholds of this language are the municipalities of Snåsa, Røyrvik, Røros and Hattfjelldal in Norway. Of the approximately 2000 Southern Sami, only about 500 still speak fluent Southern Sami. This language belongs to the Saamic group within the uralic language family and the family comprises nine groups, Saami, Finnic, Mordvin, Mari, Permic, Mansi, Khanty, Samoyed and Hungarian.

Finnish nominals, which include pronouns, adjectives, and numerals, are declined in a large number of grammatical cases, whose uses and meanings are detailed here. See also Finnish grammar.

The distributive-temporal of a noun is a grammatical case specifying when and how often something is done.

A possessive or ktetic form is a word or grammatical construction indicating a relationship of possession in a broad sense. This can include strict ownership, or a number of other types of relation to a greater or lesser degree analogous to it.

The exessive case is a grammatical case that denotes a transition away from a state. It is a rare case found in certain dialects of Baltic-Finnic languages. It completes the series of "to/in/from a state" series consisting of the translative case, the essive case and the exessive case.

The Elgeyo language, or Kalenjin proper, are a dialect cluster of the Kalenjin branch of the Nilotic language family.

In linguistics, case government is government of the grammatical case of a noun, wherein a verb or adposition is said to 'govern' the grammatical case of its noun phrase complement, e.g. in German the preposition für 'for' governs the accusative case: für mich 'for me-accusative'. Case government may modify the meaning of the verb substantially, even to meanings that are unrelated.

Tibetan grammar describes the morphology, syntax and other grammatical features of Lhasa Tibetan, a Sino-Tibetan language. Lhasa Tibetan is typologically an ergative–absolutive language. Nouns are generally unmarked for grammatical number, but are marked for case. Adjectives are never marked and appear after the noun. Demonstratives also come after the noun but these are marked for number. Verbs are possibly the most complicated part of Tibetan grammar in terms of morphology. The dialect described here is the colloquial language of Central Tibet, especially Lhasa and the surrounding area, but the spelling used reflects classical Tibetan, not the colloquial pronunciation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Inflection</span> Process of word formation

In linguistic morphology, inflection is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions and postpositions, numerals, articles, etc., as declension.

In grammar, a genitive construction or genitival construction is a type of grammatical construction used to express a relation between two nouns such as the possession of one by another, or some other type of connection. A genitive construction involves two nouns, the head and the dependent. In dependent-marking languages, a dependent genitive noun modifies the head by expressing some property of it. For example, in the construction "John's jacket", "jacket" is the head and "John's" is the modifier, expressing a property of the jacket. The analogous relationship in head-marking languages is pertensive.

Teiwa is a Papuan language spoken on the Pantar island in eastern Indonesia. The island is the second largest in the Alor archipelago, lying just west of the largest island Alor.

References

  1. ↑ O'Grady, William, John Archibald, Mark Aronoff, and Janie Rees-Miller. "Morphology: The Analysis of Word Structure." Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction. 6th ed. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2010. Print.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Niemi, Clemens. Finnish Grammar. 3rd ed. Duluth, MN: C.H. Salminen, 1945. Print.
  3. 1 2 3 Salminen, Taru. "Retention of abstract meaning: The essive case and grammaticalization of polyphony in Finnish." New Reflections on Grammaticalization. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2002. Print.
  4. 1 2 3 Moseley, Christopher. Colloquial Estonian: The Complete Course for Beginners. New York, NY: Routledge, 2008. Print.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.