casesuch

Casesuch is a hypothetical linguistic term used to describe a proposed grammatical category that would encode referential linkage to a previously mentioned referent through case marking. The concept is not widely attested in natural languages and remains primarily in theoretical and experimental grammars. It is sometimes described as a marker that signals that a noun’s case value is conditioned by an antecedent clause or discourse context.

Conceptually, casesuch could be realized as a suffix, clitic, or separate particle. It would be attached to a noun phrase to indicate that its case is determined by the antecedent's syntactic role in an earlier clause, rather than by the NP’s own position in its clause. In discourse, this marker would help listeners track referents across multiple sentences and reduce ambiguity in long sequences of events.

Typologically, casesuch is posited to interact with existing systems of case marking such as nominative–accusative or ergative architectures. Depending on the language, it could co-occur with demonstratives or anaphoric markers and might be more common in languages with rich case inventories or in constructed languages designed to test discourse-structuring mechanisms.

Illustrative, though fictional, example: In language L, The engineer CASE-SUCH arrived after the report was discussed; the CASE-SUCH on 'engineer' signals that its case is linked to the antecedent clause, guiding interpretation of the subsequent predicate. Because casesuch is hypothetical, there is no consensus on its realization or cross-linguistic prevalence.

See also: case marking, anaphora, demonstratives.