case marking

This term is a technical linguistic descriptor used primarily in academic and descriptive grammar. It refers to the morphological strategy a language uses to signal the role of a noun phrase, such as identifying who is performing an action versus who is receiving it. This distinguishes it from languages like English, which rely predominantly on word order (syntax) to convey these relationships.

Because it describes a systemic grammatical process, the term is typically treated as an uncountable noun in linguistic discourse. One does not usually refer to "a case marking" or "multiple case markings" when discussing the general phenomenon, but rather refers to the "system of case marking" or the "presence of case marking" within a specific language family.