Dairwueh: A Short Description of the Case System and its Use

Dairwueh has a case system along these lines:

nominative | accusative | dative | genitive | locative-instrumental

The nominative serves a rather restricted set of uses - subjects, nominal and adjectival complements, arguments of prepositions that are semantically similar to complements of copulas, vocative uses, sometimes also topics that have semantic roles that are rather far from anything that could be the subject.

The accusative serves as direct objects, object of a few adjectives and prepositions, subjects of the verbs 'naxmal' (expect), 'rəntigi' (withstand), and 'drumal' ('repeat'), and complements of objects.

The genitive serves as possessors, definite transitive subjects, certain objects (of the verbs 'surdəl' 'to burden with, to be burdened with', 'gəš' 'to disapprove', 'əseaŋl', 'to marry'), pre-prepositional nouns and the objects of several prepositions.

For this purpose, a pre-prepositional noun is a noun that kind of forms its own hanging utterance in a sentence in combination with a prepositional phrase:

Kadŋi ori i sembern, tauhat ma derilŋa

sit-3sgI he at table.dat, beer.gen in glass.loc-instr

Often, pre-prepositionals are body parts, clothing articles or tools: coat on him, hat on head,  knife in hand, hand on oar, foot in air. One adposition only ever appears with both preprepositionals and a regular complement - vas - which basically works a bit like 'being', the complement always basically being a descriptor of the preprepositional. If the subject is a pronoun or otherwise markedly definite the preprepositional is assumed - especially if a concrete noun - to be the possession of the subject or otherwise under it control.

The dative serves as indirect object, object of several prepositions, subject of several verbs, object of several verbs, possessors of certain nouns (generally highly animate ones), direct object of verbs that have an intensifying dummy object.

An intensifying dummy object is a semantically bleached object whose only function is to intensify the verb. These often are grammaticalized expletives:

Šamgito si xaugna mešdar

rule she INTENSE.acc husband.dat - she rules her husband strongly, xaugna originally being the name of a really minor demon in Dairwueh myths.

The locative-instrumental serves to mark place and instrument, but also manner with abstract nouns. It appears with some prepositions and as object of a few verbs. In many dialects it also marks possessums, overruling most of the case rules given above - in most dialects that have this, there's still the exception that subjects still tend to be nominative or genitive when possessums.