In
grammar
In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structure, structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clause (linguistics), clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraint ...
, the elative case (
abbreviated
An abbreviation (from Latin ''brevis'', meaning ''short'') is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method. It may consist of a group of letters or words taken from the full version of the word or phrase; for example, the word ''abbrevia ...
; from la, efferre "to bring or carry out") is a
locative grammatical case
A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers ( determiners, adjectives, participles, and Numeral (linguistics), numerals), which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In va ...
with the basic meaning "out of".
Usage
Uralic languages
In
Finnish, the elative is typically formed by adding ", in
Estonian by adding to the genitive stem, in
Livonian and in
Erzya. In
Hungarian, the suffix expresses the elative:
fi, talosta - "out of the house, from the house" (Finnish = "house")
- "out of the houses, from the houses" (Finnish = "houses")
et, majast - "out of the house, from the house" (Estonian = "house")
Erzya: - "out of the house, from the house" (Erzya = "house")
hu, házból - "out of the house" (Hungarian = "house")
In some
dialects of Finnish it is common to drop the final
vowel
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (l ...
of the elative ending, which then becomes identical to the elative
morpheme
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.
In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone ar ...
of Estonian; for example: . This pronunciation is common in southern Finland, appearing in the
southwestern dialects and in some
Tavastian dialects. Most other dialects use the standard form ''-sta''.
Russian
In some rare cases the elative still exists in contemporary Russian, though it was used more widely in 17-18th cc. texts: (out of the forest), (blood from the nose), (from Yaroslavl).
See also
Other locative cases are:
*
Inessive case ("in")
*
Illative case ("into")
*
Adessive case ("on")
*
Allative case ("onto")
*
Ablative case ("off")
*
Delative case ("off of a surface")
Further reading
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Elative Case
Grammatical cases