grammar In linguistics, grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rul ...

, the superessive case (

abbreviated An abbreviation () is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method including shortening, contraction, initialism (which includes acronym), or crasis. An abbreviation may be a shortened form of a word, usually ended with a trailing per ...

) is a

grammatical case A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and Numeral (linguistics), numerals) that corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a Nominal group (functional grammar), n ...

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 spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

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

adposition Adpositions are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in, under, towards, behind, ago'', etc.) or mark various semantic roles (''of, for''). The most common adpositions are prepositions (which precede their complemen ...

s, there are some, such as Hungarian, which make use of cases for this grammatical structure. An example in Hungarian: 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 a ...

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

References

{{Grammatical cases Grammatical cases