Othercase

Othercase is a term encountered primarily in linguistic discussions and data annotation to refer to grammatical cases that lie outside a language’s core, widely named set. It is not a formal, universally defined category in mainstream grammars, but a descriptive label used in typology, corpus annotation, and some software tools to indicate a non-standard case function or an obscure or language-specific case.

In linguistic typology, languages with large inventories of cases may include functions such as locative, illative, allative, comitative, or abessive. While many grammars assign explicit names to these cases, researchers occasionally catalog rare or language-specific cases under “othercase” to keep cross-language comparisons flexible. The term highlights the diversity of case morphology across languages rather than prescribing a fixed, universal set.

In computational linguistics and language data annotation, “Othercase” may appear as a placeholder value when an automated analysis cannot confidently classify a noun’s case, or when an entry in a lexicon lacks a defined case tag. It can also arise in user interfaces that allow manual tagging in cases where the exact case must be determined or is language-specific.

Because “othercase” is not standardized, its meaning depends on context. Writers should treat it as a provisional label rather than a formal grammatical category, and refer to language-specific case names whenever possible. In practice, the term serves as a convenience for describing non-core or uncertain case information rather than as an authoritative linguistic class.