(By Oliver Iggesen): "Morphological case on nominals is a common device to express the syntactic and semantic relationships between clausal constituents. However, the languages of the world that use this strategy vary greatly with respect to the number of case categories represented in their inflectional system. It is the purpose of this map to display this numerical variation in the productive case paradigms of substantives (full nouns) in 261 languages... The minimal case paradigm contains two members, since paradigmatic relationships between word-forms are ultimately based on binary oppositions (minimal pairs). This implies that whenever a language has an overtly marked case category expressing a specific function, a corresponding zero-marked base form is counted as a case ("default case", or "direct case") even if it has no specific function describable in positive terms. In such instances, the base form receives its case status only through the existence of a functionally and formally marked case category..."