| 4.9.0. Case Suffixes |
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Cases are a category of suffixes which exatablishes syntactic relationship between nouns and verbs. There are five distinct case suffixes in thsi language which include an accusative, a dative, a genitive, a locative-instrumental and an ablative. All noun stems whether singular or plural occurring free without an overt case suffix are said to be in the nominative. The nominative is equivalent to the uniflected stem. In the sentence pe:ki:wa:t ‘girl came’, the noun pe:ki: occurs without any case suffix or with a zero suffix. It functions as the subject or as an agent to the verb wa:t ‘came’. So it is in the nominative case relation. Vocative is not treated as separate case for the simple reason that it is constructed of an attention drawing suffix plus a noun. These case suffixes occur only after the oblique suffixes (4.8.0.).
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| 4.9.1. Accusative Suffix ‘-n’ |
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Accusative suffix denotes the direct object of the verb. It has three allomorphs: /-n/, /-un/ and /-kun/. -/n/ occurs (i) after a vowel, (ii) after consonant -l, (iii) after third person singular and (iv) after demonstratives. In the last given environment it occurs after the oblique -e: and in the rest occurs after the oblique -Ø.
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pe mo:-Ø-n |
‘the boy’ |
| ma:ne:-Ø- |
‘the man’ |
| akka:-Ø-n |
‘the elder sister’ |
mu u:-Ø-n |
‘the people’ |
da:da:l-n  da:da: -Ø-n |
‘the elder brother’ |
| go:tya:l-n go:tya: - Ø-n |
‘the friend’ |
| mayma:l-n mayma: - Ø-n |
‘the father’ |
| wo:r-n wo:- Ø -n |
‘him’ (remote) |
| we:r-n we:-Ø-n |
‘him’ (proximate) |
| ad-n ad-e:n |
‘that thing, she’ |
| aw-n aw-e:-n |
‘those things, those women’ |
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/-un/ occurs after the oblique -t with singular nouns other than ending in -l.
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| bu:m-tun |
‘the land’ |
| tra:s-t-un |
‘the snake’ |
| miya:-t-un |
‘the daughter’ |
| kan-t-un |
‘the eye’ |
| pad-t-un |
‘the pig’ |
| a:ki:-t-un |
‘the leaf’ |
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