Prepositional

Prepositional cases

adapted from a 5 May, 1997 post by Irene Gates

I don't know whether other languages have a prepositional case (the ones I know don't), but in Russian it is not the case (!) that all prepositions govern the prepositional; they can also govern the accusative, genitive, dative, or instrumental. [...] The prepositional case is so-called because it has no other function;...

Correct. So any case in any language which never occurs without a preposition could be called a prepositional case, but as far as I know the term is only used for Russian (don't know about Ukrainian and Belorussian).

Then again, in Russian the prepositional case is actually two cases: it has two different forms for a large group of nouns, and those are semantically distinct, e.g.

iskat' ser'gu v snegu` "seek an earring in the snow" (physical location),
iskat' krasotu v sne`ge "seek beauty in the snow" (metaphorical location).

This distinction is a relatively recent one, however.

...because of its use with v and na it is also sometimes called the locative.

Also because it is cognate to the locative in the other Indo-European languages which have preserved the old case system pretty much intact. In Old Slavic it did not have to be governed by a preposition, by the way; it could mark locative adjuncts on its own.

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