Esetjelölés

Esetjelölés is a linguistic term describing the grammatical marking of nouns, pronouns and related elements to indicate their role in a sentence. In languages with case marking, a word changes form or takes a marker to show functions such as subject, direct object, possession, location or direction. These markers are called cases, and their set and form vary across languages.

Case marking can be overt, using inflections or suffixes on the noun (and sometimes on accompanying adjectives or determiners), or analytic, using separate prepositions or postpositions together with a noun phrase. Some languages rely heavily on inflectional morphology, while others use relatively few markers and depend more on word order to express relations. There are languages with many cases, and languages with only a few or none at all.

In grammatical description, case marking interacts with agreement, syntax, and discourse structure. It enables flexible word order in many languages, since the relationship between sentence participants is signaled by the case rather than by position alone. It also supports distinctions such as definite versus indefinite objects, possession, or various spatial and directional meanings.

Hungarian, as a widely cited example, uses a rich system of case marking. Nouns and pronouns take suffixes that encode several cases, contributing to a relatively free word order and affecting agreement with verbs and determiners. The specific inventory and realizations of cases vary by language, but the core idea remains: esetjelölés is the mechanism by which grammatical roles are signaled through noun-related forms.