Distributive Case¶
A distributive case or case-like form marks a noun as the unit over whose members, groups, places, or intervals a quantity, comparison, or event applies separately—'per N,' 'N by N,' or 'every N.'
Core Idea¶
A distributive case is a morphological case or case-like nominal form whose central job is to establish a distributive unit: the entity, group, place, category, or interval with respect to which a quantity, comparison, or event is applied separately. Its most characteristic translations are “per N,” “by N,” “N by N,” and “every N.” Hungarian kutyánként “per dog,” házanként “per house,” and péntekenként “every Friday” illustrate the function. Finnish maittain and Estonian riigiti support “by country” readings in which values or practices are compared separately across countries.
Scope of Application¶
The home domain is descriptive and comparative morphosyntax, especially Uralic languages. Hungarian provides the clearest productive per N / after every N system in the evidence reviewed. Finnish and Estonian provide closely related distributive forms whose internal syntax creates a documented boundary problem between denominal adverbs and nominal case inflection. The abstraction is useful to grammar writers, typologists, morphologists, semanticists, corpus annotators, and language-technology designers.
Clarity¶
To diagnose a proposed distributive case or form, ask:
- What is the morphological exponent, and to which bases can it attach? 2. Does the marked expression remain recognizably noun-based, or is it a fixed lexical adverb? 3. Which units does the base contribute—individuals, containers, measures, groups, places, categories, or intervals? 4. What relation is evaluated separately with respect to those units? 5. Does the form change a collective or undifferentiated reading into a per-unit, grouped, or comparison reading?
Manages Complexity¶
Distributive marking compresses repeated relational structure. Instead of enumerating “for dog one, 5,000; for dog two, 5,000; for dog three, 5,000,” the grammar marks dog as the denominator once. Instead of listing a different row for every country, a by-country form declares the comparison dimension. Instead of naming every Friday, a temporal distributive specifies the interval class over which recurrence is evaluated.
Abstract Reasoning¶
Recognizing a distributive form licenses several conditional inferences.
- Denominator inference: in a rate expression, the marked noun identifies what one unit of the stated quantity is “per.” Multiplying the rate by the number of relevant units is licensed only if the same amount applies to each unit and no contextual exception intervenes.
- Granularity inference: replacing the base changes the cells.
Knowledge Transfer¶
Within linguistics, the role structure transfers across grammar writing, semantic analysis, corpus annotation, and language technology. A descriptive grammarian identifies the exponent and its distribution. A semanticist models the key and the distributed relation. A corpus annotator decides whether the token receives a case feature or an adverbial derivation analysis. A machine-translation system must preserve granularity when moving between bound morphology and free expressions such as per, each, by, or every.
Relationships to Other Abstractions¶
Current abstraction Distributive Case Domain-specific
Parents (1) — more general patterns this builds on
-
Distributive Case is a kind of Quantifier Prime
The minimal parent is Quantifier.
Hierarchy path (1) — routes to 1 parentless root
- Distributive Case → Quantifier → Predicate → Relation
Neighborhood in Abstraction Space¶
Distributive Case sits in a sparse region of the domain-specific corpus (78th percentile for distinctiveness): few abstractions share its structure, so a faithful description tends to retrieve it precisely.
Family — Unclustered & Miscellaneous (1565 abstractions)
Nearest neighbors
- Antessive Case — 0.84
- Dubitative Mood — 0.84
- Postings List — 0.83
- Lexical Definition — 0.82
- Grammatical Relation — 0.82
Computed from structural-signature embeddings · 2026-09-08