pádová

Pádové is an adjective stemming from the Czech noun pád, meaning case. In linguistic usage, pádové describes anything related to grammatical case, including the set of inflectional forms that mark case on nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and numerals. The term is commonly used to refer to pádové koncovky (case endings), pádové tvary (case forms), and the general system of declension in a language.

In languages with a case system, words change shape to express syntactic relations such as subject, direct object, possession, or the role of a word with a preposition. The Czech language traditionally uses a seven-case system: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative, and instrumental. Each case signals a different grammatical function and interacts with gender and number, producing characteristic endings for nouns, adjectives, and pronouns. Adjective endings, for example, must agree with the noun in gender, number, and case, giving rise to many pádové forms that learners must memorize in paradigms (declension patterns).

Beyond traditional grammar teaching, pádové analysis is a common tool in morphological tagging and natural language processing, where words are labeled by their case to aid syntactic parsing. The concept also appears in grammars and dictionaries as a way to organize and present word forms by their pádové forms.

In summary, pádové refers to the realm of grammatical case forms that determine a word’s function within a sentence, a central aspect of inflectional morphology in languages such as Czech.