Grammar

• a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their heads
  
• A role that one of these languages marks by case will often be marked in English using a preposition.
  
• Languages having cases often exhibit free word order, because thematic roles are not required to be marked by position in the sentence
  
• case is a morphological category
  

subject pronoun

object pronoun, 'to'

possessive and 'of'

'by', 'via', 'with'

Cases can be ranked in the following hierarchy, where a language that does not have a given case will tend not to have any cases to the right of the missing case:[4]:p.89

nominative → accusative or ergative → genitive → dative → locative or prepositional → ablative and/or instrumental → others.

This is, however, only a general tendency.