The system of local cases is structured along two dimensions. One is location: 'inside' versus 'outside'. The other is direction: 'static', 'movement towards' and 'movement away from'. The local cases also have many other meanings apart from place and direction. Some may express for example time, reason, instrument or manner. The most frequently used local cases are the inessive and the illative. The syntactic function of a noun phrase carrying a local case ending is adverbial. The set of local cases has a natural threefold division: both internal and external local cases can express static location, movement towards or movement away from. In Finnish, adverbials associated with some verbs expressing change or direction appear in one of the directional cases, elative, illative, ablative, allative, whereas in many Indo-European languages the equivalent expression would contain a 'static' preposition.