Georgian Grammar - Case System

Case System

Georgian has seven grammatical cases: nominative, ergative (also known in the Kartvelological literature as the narrative (motxrobiti) case, due to the rather inaccurate suggestion of regular ergativity, and that this case occurs generally only in the aorist series, which usually moves the narrative forward), dative, genitive, instrumental, adverbial and vocative.

The nominative, ergative and dative are core cases, and due to the complex morphosyntactic alignment of Georgian, each one has several different functions and also overlap with each other, in different contexts. They will be treated together with the verb system.

The non-core cases are the genitive, the instrumental, the adverbial and the vocative.

• The genitive case is the equivalent of the preposition of or the possessive clitic -'s in English. In the phrase "the republic of Georgia", the word "Georgia" is in the genitive case: Sakartvelos resp'ublik'a.
• The instrumental case corresponds to the preposition with in English, as in, "he is cutting with a knife", where the word "knife" is in the instrumental case. It also occurs with the objects of certain postpositions.
• The adverbial case commonly marks adverbial phrases. It is also used in some other contexts, especially while using the name of languages. For example, in the sentence "can you translate this to Georgian?", Georgian is in the adverbial case.
• The vocative case is used in addressing someone. when, for example, a mother calls her child with bat'ono? (meaning "sir?"), the child says "yes?". An interesting fact about the Georgian vocative case is that with proper names, the use of the vocative case sounds condescending or rude, and so it tends to be limited to common nouns: rogora xart, Zurab (*Zurabo)? ("How are you, Zurab?").