caseend

Caseend is a term used in linguistic typology and morphology to refer to the final affix or clitic attached to a noun or pronoun to indicate grammatical case. The caseend functions as a morphological marker that signals syntactic roles such as nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, or other case categories, and may also encode number or definiteness in some languages. It is typically realized as a suffix but can also appear as a stem vowel change, a separate clitic on the word, or as part of a fused affix depending on the language's morphophonology.

In descriptions of languages with rich case systems, the caseend is distinguished from the root or stem of the word, and from the article or determiner when those are separate words. The caseend is often studied in relation to declension classes, which determine which endings appear for different nouns, adjectives, or pronouns.

Cross-linguistically, case endings vary in form and distribution. Some languages have a full set of case endings that mark both case and number, while others have reduced or syncretic endings where one ending marks multiple cases. Phonological alternations may occur at the boundary between stem and caseend (sandhi), and some caseends trigger consonant or vowel changes in the stem.

In computational linguistics, caseends are frequently annotated as part of morphology or syntactic tagging schemes, supporting parsing, machine translation, and language documentation.

See also: grammatical case, inflection, suffix, clitic, morphology, syntax.