Construct · 2 fields · 3 citations

Where does case collide?

One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.

● jingle · one word, two constructs Nearest construct by meaningmattercompare the meanings
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case2 CONSTRUCTSGrammatical caseBLAKE · NOUN INFLECTIONCase (unit)GERRING · UNIT OF STUDY

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2026

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Linguistics and grammar

The inflectional marking of a noun

A grammatical category that marks the role a noun, pronoun, or adjective plays in its clause, typically through inflection: nominative for a subject, accusative for an object, genitive for a possessor, and so on. Blake's 2001 Case surveyed how languages use these markings to signal who did what to whom, and how case systems differ in size and organisation from one language to the next. The referent is a formal property of words in a grammar, described by paradigms and endings, and it has nothing to do with a lawsuit, a patient, or a chosen unit of research beyond the shared spelling.[1]

Unit
A grammatical role marked on a word, named by its case form
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Described by inflectional paradigms and by the syntactic and semantic roles each case form signals across a language

Research methods

The bounded unit of analysis

A bounded instance of a broader class, chosen as the unit of analysis in research: in case-study work the case is a single phenomenon, one firm, one event, one country, studied in depth to say something about the class it belongs to. Gerring's 2004 What is a case study and what is it good for? defined a case as a spatially bounded unit observed at some point or period in time, and Ragin and Becker's 1992 What is a case? showed that deciding what counts as a case is itself an act of the researcher. The referent is an analytic unit, which in a dataset shrinks to a single observation or row, and it is neither a lawsuit, a grammatical marking, nor a patient in a tally.[2][3]

Unit
One bounded instance of a class, from a rich case to a single data row
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Delimited by the researcher's choice of boundaries, then described in depth or entered as one observation among many

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Nearby collisions

causation6 fields · 15 citationsjingle · one name, six constructssample3 fields · 3 citationsjingle · one word, three constructsargument3 fields · 3 citationsjingle · one word, three constructs

References

  1. Blake, B. J. (2001). Case (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521014915
  2. Gerring, J. (2004). What is a case study and what is it good for? American Political Science Review, 98(2), 341–354. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055404001182
  3. Ragin, C. C., & Becker, H. S. (Eds.). (1992). What is a case? Exploring the foundations of social inquiry. Cambridge University Press.

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