Grammatical Cases & Clause Structure

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Abstractions about how languages encode arguments, operators, constituents, and relations within clauses. They include case systems, complements and particles, pronouns, prepositions, subjects, crossover constraints, functional items, and categorical models of compositional grammar.

19 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.

• Ablative (Latin) — The Latin nominal case consolidating inherited ablative, instrumental and locative functions to mark separation, means, accompaniment, cause, place, time and related adverbial relations.
• Absolutive case — Mark the sole argument of an intransitive clause and the patient-like argument of a transitive clause alike in an ergative-absolutive alignment, contrasting them with the transitive agent.
• Adverbial complement — An adverbial phrase selected by a verb or construction whose omission makes the clause ungrammatical or changes the verb's lexical or constructional interpretation.
• Captative verb — A denominal verb whose lexical meaning is obtaining, gathering, catching, or hunting the referent named by its base.
• Clause — A grammatical constituent organized around a predicative relation, typically a predicate with an expressed or contextually recoverable subject or predicand.
• Common operator notation — A formal-expression grammar in which operands and prefix, infix, postfix, grouping, and separator operators are parsed through precedence and associativity rules.
• Constituent (linguistics) — A word or word sequence treated as one hierarchical syntactic unit, supported by converging diagnostics such as substitution, movement, coordination, answer fragments, and theory-specific structural analysis.
• Crossover effects — Binding restrictions that arise when a moved phrase crosses a coreferential pronoun, with strong and weak forms depending on grammatical relation and representation.
• Direct case — A grammatical case that marks a language-specific broad set of core clause arguments, often spanning roles otherwise divided between nominative, accusative, ergative, or absolutive.
• DisCoCat — A categorical compositional distributional semantics framework in which a structure-preserving functor maps grammatical derivations to operations that compose word meanings in a vector-space or other distributional semantic category.
• Functional item — A grammatical lexical or morphological item whose primary contribution is syntactic or grammatical structure rather than rich descriptive content, such as determiners, auxiliaries, complementizers, and inflectional features.
• Grammatical particle — A typically uninflected function word or bound-like item that contributes grammatical or discourse meaning while resisting assignment to a major lexical category.
• Independent clause — A clause capable of functioning as a complete sentence because it has the syntactic status and internal structure of a main clause rather than being grammatically subordinated to another clause.
• Indeterminate pronoun — A wh-derived pronoun whose interpretation changes among interrogative, existential, universal, negative-polarity or free-choice readings under different grammatical operators.
• Locative case — A grammatical case marking location or spatial setting on a noun phrase.
• Multiplicative case — A Finnish and Hungarian adverbial form marking the number of times an action occurs and, in related uses, manner or intensification.
• Operator (linguistics) — In generative grammar, an expression that participates in an A-bar dependency and binds or licenses an interpreted variable position.
• Preposition stranding — A syntactic configuration in which a preposition is separated from its selected complement, often after movement or ellipsis.
• Specified subject condition — A historical transformational-grammar constraint blocking certain rule applications across a clause or phrase containing an overt lexical subject distinct from the moved or related element.