The Hungarian "formativus, or essivus-formalis `-ként' ... usually expresses a position, task and manner of the person or the thing." (Nose 2003), e.g., Hungarian 'katonaként' -> [serves] as a soldier. (Csaba Oravecz, email 2010/06/15)<br/><br/>
"Haspelmath & Buchholz (1998:321) explained the function of the essive case as ``role phrases''. Role phrases represent the role of the function in which a participant appears. They regard the role phrases as adverbial."
(Nose 2003, p. 117)<br/>
In the Hungarian language this case combines the Essive case and the Formal case, and it can express the position, task, state (e.g. "as a tourist"), or the manner (e.g. "like a hunted animal"). The status of the suffix -ként in the declension system is disputed for several reasons. First, in general, Hungarian case suffixes are absolute word-final, while -ként permits further suffixation by the locative suffix -i. Second, most Hungarian case endings participate in vowel harmony, while -ként does not. For these reasons, many modern analyses of the Hungarian case system, starting with László Antal's "A magyar esetrendszer" (1961) do not consider the essive/formal to be a case.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essive-formal_case)<br/>
cf. Masahiko Nose (2003), Adverbial Usage of the Hungarian Essive Case