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Definition from de UD website

Case is usually an inflectional feature of nouns and, depending on language, other parts of speech (pronouns, adjectives, determiners, numerals, verbs) that mark agreement with nouns.

Case can also be a lexical feature of adpositions and describe the case meaning that the adposition contributes to the nominal in which it appears. (This usage of the feature is typical for languages that do not have case morphology on nouns. For languages that have both adpositions and morphological case, the traditional set of cases is determined by the nominal forms and it does not cover adpositional meanings.) In some non-UD tagsets, case of adpositions is used as a valency feature (saying that the adposition requires its nominal argument to be in that morphological case); however, annotating adposition valency case in UD treebanks would be superfluous because the same case feature can be found at the nominal to which the adposition belongs.

Case helps specify the role of the noun phrase in the sentence, especially in free-word-order languages. For example, the nominative and accusative cases often distinguish subject and object of the verb, while in fixed-word-order languages these functions would be distinguished merely by the positions of the nouns in the sentence.

Here on the level of morphosyntactic features we are dealing with case expressed morphologically, i.e. by bound morphemes (affixes). Note that on a higher level case can be understood more broadly as the role, and it can be also expressed by adding an adposition to the noun. What is expressed by affixes in one language can be expressed using adpositions in another language. Cf. the case dependency label.

Examples

[cs] nominative matka “mother”, genitive matky, dative matce, accusative matku, vocative matko, locative matce, instrumental matkou
[de] nominative der Mann “the man”, genitive des Mannes, dative dem Mann, accusative den Mann
[en] nominative/direct case he, she, accusative/oblique case him, her. The descriptions of the individual case values below include semantic hints about the prototypical meaning of the case. Bear in mind that quite often a case will be used for a meaning that is totally unrelated to the meaning mentioned here. Valency of verbs, adpositions and other words will determine that the noun phrase must be in a particular grammatical case to fill a particular valency slot (semantic role). It is much the same as trying to explain the meaning of prepositions: most people would agree that the central meaning of English in is location in space or time but there are phrases where the meaning is less locational: In God we trust. Say it in English.

Note that Indian corpora based on the so-called Paninian model use a related feature called vibhakti. It is a merger of the Case feature described here and of various postpositions. Values of the feature are language-dependent because they are copies of the relevant morphemes (either bound morphemes or postpositions). Vibhakti can be mapped on the Case values described here if we know 1. which source values are bound morphemes (postpositions are separate nodes for us) and 2. what is their meaning. For instance, the genitive case (Gen) in Bengali is marked using the suffix -ra (-র), i.e. vib=era. In Hindi, the suffix has been split off the noun and it is now written as a separate word – the postposition kā/kī/ke (का/की/के). Even if the postpositional phrase can be understood as a genitive noun phrase, the noun is not in genitive. Instead, the postposition requires that it takes one of three case forms that are marked directly on the noun: the oblique case (Acc).

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