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The cases and their uses

Greek has five cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive and dative. Indo-European had eight. The Greek genitive took over the ablative (separation, "from"), and the Greek dative took over the instrumental ("with, by") and the locative ("in, at"). Each Greek case therefore carries several old functions, and the prepositions sort them out (chapter 12). This chapter gives the uses of each case, grouped by those old functions. It compares them with Latin, which kept the ablative (la chapter 7), and counts how the cases fall into UD relations in the Septuagint.

Contents

  1. The five cases and the eight functions
  2. Nominative and vocative
  3. Accusative
  4. Genitive
  5. Dative
  6. Place, time and the old locative
  7. The cases in the treebank
  8. How Mova handles it
  9. Sources

1. The five cases and the eight functions

Greek caseold functions it carriesLatin counterpart
nominativesubject, predicatenominative
vocativeaddressvocative
accusativedirect object, extent, direction, respectaccusative
genitivegenitive proper (of belonging, part, quality) and ablative (separation, source, comparison)genitive and ablative of separation
dativedative proper (recipient, interest) and instrumental (means, manner, accompaniment) and locative (place, time)dative and ablative of means, place and time

(smyth-1920 §§1279–1282)

2. Nominative and vocative

The nominative is the case of the subject and of the predicate with verbs of being, becoming, seeming, being named (smyth-1920 §§938–940): Κῦρος βασιλεὺς ἐγένετο "Cyrus became king". The article tells the subject from the predicate when both are nominatives (chapter 5, §5).

The vocative is the case of address, often with ὦ (smyth-1920 §§1283–1288): ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι "men of Athens". It has its own form only in the singular of some nouns (Σώκρατες, ἄνθρωπε); elsewhere it is the nominative form.

3. Accusative

The accusative is the case of the direct object and of what the action reaches or extends over (smyth-1920 §§1551–1633):

4. Genitive

The genitive proper limits a noun, as an adjective would (smyth-1920 §§1289–1338):

The ablatival genitive: separation, source and comparison:

The genitive of time within which: νυκτός "by night", τριῶν ἡμερῶν "within three days" (§6).

5. Dative

The dative proper: the person or thing interested in the action (smyth-1920 §§1450–1550):

The instrumental dative:

The locative dative: place (in poetry and in names: Μαραθῶνι "at Marathon") and time at which: τῇ ὑστεραίᾳ "on the next day" (§6).

6. Place, time and the old locative

placetime
accusativeto which (poetry; prose uses εἰς, πρός)how long: τρεῖς ἡμέρας "for three days"
genitive(ablatival) from which (poetry); within which: τῆς ὁδοῦ "on the road"within which: νυκτός "by night", τοῦ λοιποῦ "in future"
dativeat which: Μαραθῶνι, οἴκοι (locative form)at which: τῇ αὐτῇ ἡμέρᾳ "on the same day"

A few old locatives survive: οἴκοι "at home", Ἀθήνησι "at Athens", Πυθοῖ "at Delphi"; and adverbs of place in -θεν "from", -δε "to": οἴκοθεν "from home", οἴκαδε "homewards", Ἀθήναζε "to Athens" (smyth-1920 §§342–344, 1531–1548).

7. The cases in the treebank

How the cases of nouns and names fall into UD relations in the PTNK training set (Genesis and Ruth, UD 2.18, counted 2026-10-22):

casemain relations
nominativensubj 720, conj 113, appos 90, obl 48, nsubj:pass 36
accusativeobj 508, obl 213, conj 92, appos 37
genitivenmod:poss 585, obl 192, appos 50, conj 29
dativeobl 204, iobj 155, nmod 33, conj 31

The accusative is an object two times in three and otherwise obl (with a preposition or of extent). The genitive is a possessor three times in four. Here the Septuagint follows the Hebrew construct chain and uses the genitive more than Attic does (υἱοὶ Ἰσραήλ "the sons of Israel"). The dative is obl (with ἐν and other prepositions, or of means) more than an indirect object.

8. How Mova handles it

In the UD trees. The case is in the noun's FEATS. The relation (obj, iobj, obl, nmod) is the function. A case does not decide its relation: an accusative may be an object or extent, a genitive a possessor, a partitive object or a separation. In PTNK the ambiguous forms keep the set of cases (Case=Acc,Nom: chapter 3).

In Mova. As for Latin, the tag set en xpos-fill maps to has no case, so the parser sees only the word and its English-style tag, and must learn the relation from the order and the words around. For Greek, whose order is freer than the Septuagint's, this is the main loss: the PTNK baseline is LAS 74.41 with Mova's own tags and 78.29 with gold tags (dev, 2026-10-22), well below its Latin LLCT score. What a Greek frames reader needs from this chapter:

  1. The case in the parser's input, as a feature beside the tag. This is the step that would help Latin and Greek alike, and it is the next one to measure.
  2. The functions of §1 read from case and relation together: an obl genitive with a verb of separating is a source, a dative obl with no preposition is a means or a time, an obl accusative of a time noun is extent.
  3. The genitive of comparison read as the second term of a comparison, like than.

9. Sources

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/grc/11-cases/