Kasuslage

Kasuslage is a term used in linguistics to describe the relationship between grammatical case marking and the syntactic placement of noun phrases within a clause. It concerns how case morphology (such as nominative, accusative, dative, genitive) and the position of noun phrases work together to indicate grammatical functions like subject, direct object, or indirect object in languages with inflected case systems.

The term derives from German, with Kasus meaning case and Lage meaning position or situation. It is employed in descriptive grammars and cross-linguistic typology to analyze how languages encode roles through both morphology and word order. Kasuslage is distinct from the broader concept of the case system (Kasussystem) and from routine word order descriptions.

In practice, Kasuslage helps explain why certain word orders are possible or preferred given the presence of explicit case markings. In languages with strong case contrasts, word order can be relatively flexible because case endings signal grammatical relations. Conversely, in languages with weaker or absent case marking, stricter word order may be necessary to convey who is doing what to whom. The concept also interacts with phenomena such as focus, scrambling, and voice, which can alter surface order without changing underlying grammatical roles.

Example: in a language with nominative and accusative marking, a sentence can be understood correctly whether the subject precedes or follows the verb, provided the subject bears the nominative case and the object the accusative. This illustrates how Kasuslage links case morphology to clause structure and interpretation.