Case system vs. Prepositional system: russian and uzbek compared to english

Abstract

Grammatical relations in natural languages are commonly expressed through either morphological case systems or syntactic devices such as prepositions and fixed word order. This article presents a functional-typological comparison of the case systems in Russian and Uzbek with the predominantly prepositional system of English. Russian, an inflectional Slavic language, employs a rich case system to mark grammatical and semantic relations. Uzbek, an agglutinative Turkic language, also relies on case suffixes, though with different structural and functional properties. English, by contrast, has largely lost its morphological case system and compensates through prepositions and rigid word order. The study aims to examine how these different strategies encode syntactic relations, spatial meanings, and semantic roles, and how they affect syntactic flexibility and discourse organization. Using a qualitative comparative methodology based on descriptive grammars and functional-typological theory, the paper demonstrates that while case marking allows greater freedom of constituent order, prepositional systems tend to impose stricter syntactic constraints. The findings contribute to typological research by highlighting the functional trade-offs between morphological and syntactic means of grammatical encoding.