casedeclined

Casedeclined (or case-declined) is a linguistic term used to describe words that undergo inflection for grammatical case, yielding distinct forms for different syntactic roles. In languages with case systems, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and sometimes numerals can be casedeclined; the pattern of endings constitutes a declension paradigm. The term is used mainly in descriptive linguistics and in some computational annotation schemes to categorize words by their morphological behavior.

Derived from case and declined, the compound emphasizes the inflectional nature of the word's morphology. It is not a universally fixed label in reference grammars, and variants such as case-marked or case-inflected are often preferred in standard descriptions.

In German, nouns such as Mann decline across cases: nominative der Mann, genitive des Mannes, dative dem Mann, accusative den Mann; Latin and Russian likewise mark nouns and adjectives for case, producing multiple endings that signal grammatical function.

In computational linguistics and language corpora, casedeclined may be used as an annotation tag to indicate that a token bears a case ending, aiding morphological analyzers and parsers. It contrasts with uninflected words, which do not show case endings.

See also: case, declension, morphology, inflection, case-marked.