The prepositional case is a grammatical form used for nouns and pronouns in some languages, such as Russian and Czech. Prepositions relate nouns to other words and always have an object noun. English does not use different words for subjective and objective nouns, but some languages do.
The prepositional case is the grammatically required derivative of a word, mainly nouns and pronouns, when it forms part of a prepositional phrase. A preposition is a word that relates a noun to other words, such as by direction, location, or position. Except for pronouns, which change shape based on grammar in many languages, it’s rare. Slavic languages, such as Russian and Czech, along with Spanish and Portuguese are examples of languages that use the prepositional case.
Examples of prepositions include the words above, through and in. A preposition is always associated with an object noun. The following is a sentence with a prepositional phrase: “she sent you a message”. While the word “she” is the subjective case for a female singular, a different form of the pronoun – she – is used because it is the object of the preposition “a”. While there is some disagreement about the definition, the prepositional case is also sometimes called the locative case.
Linguistics theorists and others who study language assume that this prepositional pronoun change common to many languages is to make the relationship between people more defined. Some languages that have no prepositional case may rely entirely on the arrangement of nouns to establish their relationship. For the above sentence, the word order “he-message-her” could be sufficiently understood without resorting to an entirely different case for the words. In written Portuguese, some pronouns do not change, but are new words derived by combining and contracting the pronoun with the preposition.
The Russian and Polish languages employ a strict prepositional case for a few selected prepositions, namely for the equivalent of the English words on, in, near and about. Any nouns following these words as the object of the preposition must be changed to the attachment of their respectively correct suffix. Adjectives describing this noun also need to be modified to reflect this grammatical case.
Except for pronouns, English does not use different words to distinguish whether a noun is subjective or objective. Other languages, such as German and Latin, change the shape of their names slightly. Very few languages go further with prepositional cases to separate nouns used as direct objects, indirect objects, or objects of a preposition. Some languages may not have a separate case, but may require additional grammar rules. Spanish, for example, requires a second preposition – equivalent to “of” – when the object noun is a word that represents a human being.
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