casesiveness

Casesiveness refers to a linguistic phenomenon where the grammatical case of a word, typically a noun or pronoun, is influenced by the syntactic context of another word in the sentence. This influence is not about agreement, where two words share the same case, but rather about one word dictating or causing the case of another word. This is distinct from inherent case marking, which is assigned based on the word's role in its own clause.

In some languages, casesiveness can manifest in ways that might appear unusual to speakers of languages with simpler case systems. For example, a preposition might not have a fixed case government but instead takes on a case determined by the case of the noun it governs, or vice versa. This dynamic relationship between words in terms of case marking is a key characteristic of casesiveness. It highlights how grammatical relationships can be expressed through the manipulation of inflectional morphology in complex ways. The study of casesiveness often involves detailed analysis of sentence structure and the interaction of different grammatical elements.