Grammatical Case & Reference

← Back to Domain-Specific Families

Abstractions about how languages mark grammatical relations and reference, covering case systems (nominative, equative, and construct-state marking), noun-classification systems like grammatical gender, and how words form and refer, including conversion word-formation and referring expressions.

10 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Construct State — In Afro-Asiatic languages, the first noun in a genitive phrase that consists of a possessed noun followed by a possessor noun often takes on a special morphological form, which is termed the construct state (Latin status constructus).
• Conversion (word formation) — In linguistics, conversion, also called zero derivation or null derivation, is a kind of word formation involving the creation of a word (of a new part of speech) from an existing word (of a different part of speech) without any change in form, which is to say, derivation using only zero.
• Equative case — The equative case (abbreviated ) is a grammatical case prototypically expressing the standard of comparison of equal values ("as… as…").
• Grammatical case — A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and numerals) that corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording.
• Grammatical gender — In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns.
• Lative Case — A language-specific nominal case category associated with direction-to relations but licensed and extended by its own grammatical paradigm.
• Nominative case — In grammar, the nominative case (abbreviated ), subjective case, straight case, or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb, or (in Latin and formal variants of English) a predicative nominal or adjective, as opposed to its object, or other verb arguments.
• Partitive Construction — A nominal construction that selects a member or portion in relation to an expressed set or entity whole through language-specific linkage.
• Pudgalavada — The Pudgalavāda (Sanskrit: "Personalism"; Pali: Puggalavāda; ; ) was a Buddhist philosophical view and also refers to a group of Nikāya Buddhist schools (mainly known as Vātsīputrīyas) that arose from the Sthavira Nikāya.
• Referring expression — In linguistics, a referring expression (RE) is any noun phrase, or surrogate for a noun phrase, whose function in discourse is to identify some individual object.