grammar In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraints, a field that includes doma ...

, the superessive 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 ...

) is a

grammatical case A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers ( determiners, adjectives, participles, and numerals), which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nomin ...

indicating location on top of, or on the surface of something. Its name comes from

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...

''supersum, superesse'': to be over and above. While most languages communicate this concept through the use of

adposition Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...

s, there are some, such as Hungarian, which make use of cases for this grammatical structure. An example in Hungarian: ''a könyveken'' means "on the books", literally "the books-on". In Finnish, superessive is a case in the

adverbial In English grammar, an adverbial ( abbreviated ) is a word (an adverb) or a group of words (an adverbial clause or adverbial phrase) that modifies or more closely defines the sentence or the verb. (The word ''adverbial'' itself is also used as an ...

cases category, that are productive only with a limited set of stems. The superessive is marked with the -alla/-ällä ending. For example: * ''kaikkialla'' means "everywhere" (literally "everything-at") * ''täällä'' means "(at) here" (from ''tämä'' - "this", lit. "at this place") * ''muualla'' means "(at) somewhere else" (from ''muu'' - "other", lit. "other-at") In Lezgian, the superessive case is marked with suffixes: ''sew-re-l'' 'on the bear'. p. 74. Haspelmath, Martin. 1993. ''A Grammar of Lezgian.'' Walter de Gruyter.

References

{{Grammatical cases Grammatical cases