caseoften

Caseoften is a term used in linguistics to denote a quantitative measure of how frequently grammatical case is realized overtly in a language or corpus. It captures the propensity of a language to mark nouns with case endings or clitics, and it is used in typological and computational studies to compare morphosyntactic systems across languages.

The term Caseoften was introduced in theoretical discussions of cross-linguistic case marking by researchers who sought a concise way to describe overt case realization as a probabilistic tendency. It is not yet standardized across the field, and its exact definition can vary by study, but it generally refers to the frequency with which nouns or noun phrases bear explicit case marking in observable data.

Calculation typically involves a ratio: the number of overtly case-marked noun phrases divided by the total number of noun phrases that could bear case within a given corpus or utterance sample. Some implementations distinguish between nominative, accusative, dative, and other cases, and may weight results by corpus size, genre, or morphological richness. Clear annotation guidelines and consistent data selection are important for comparability.

Applications of Caseoften include typological surveys, language documentation, and natural language processing. In NLP, Caseoften can inform feature engineering for parsers and machine translation by highlighting languages with rich overt marking versus those with sparse marking. It also supports cross-linguistic comparisons of syntactic alignment and case systems, though researchers note that results depend on annotation schemes, genre, and diachronic variation.

Related concepts include case marking, morphosyntax, corpus linguistics, and language typology. Examples from Russian, Turkish, and Mandarin illustrate how overt and non-overt case realization affects Caseoften calculations.