Tilläggsfall

Tilläggsfall, literally “supplementary case,” is a term used in linguistics and Swedish grammar to describe a grammatical case that marks elements that are not core arguments of the predicate but provide supplementary information, such as adjuncts, appositive phrases, or other peripheral modifiers. The concept is mainly encountered in historical grammars and typological descriptions rather than in everyday modern Swedish.

In cross-linguistic descriptions, tilläggsfall denotes a peripheral case category whose exact function varies by language. Some languages use such a case to indicate relations like accompaniment, manner, instrument, or possession for non-core constituents; others treat the category as a catch-all for peripheral cases that do not fit the standard nominative, accusative, genitive patterns.

In Swedish scholarship, tilläggsfall is not a standard part of contemporary Swedish grammar but appears in older treatises and comparative work. It is used to discuss how some languages handle extra information in a sentence, and to compare how different languages grammatically package supplements.

Realizations of tilläggsfall differ: it may appear as a dedicated inflection, a prepositional phrase, or a particle, depending on the language. The exact boundaries between tilläggsfall and other peripheral cases or syntactic constructions often depend on the theoretical framework being used.

See also: grammatical case, apposition, clitic, typology, supplement.