Home > Accusative case
#REDIRECT Case tableThe accusative case of a noun is, generally, the case used to mark the direct object of a verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of (some or all) prepositions.
The accusative case exists (or existed once) in all the Indo-European languages (including Latin, Sanskrit, Greek, German, Russian), in the Finno-Ugric languages, and in Semitic languages (such as Arabic).
Modern English, which lacks declension in its nouns, still has an explicitly marked accusative case in a few pronouns as a remnant of Old EnglishOld English (also called Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language which was spoken in England around the year 1000. It is a West Germanic language, and is therefore similar to Frisian and Old Saxon. It is also quite similar to Old Norse (and,, an earlier declined form of the language. "Whom" is the accusative case of "who"; "him" is the accusative case of "he"; and "her" is the accusative case of "she". These words also serve as the dative caseThe dative case is a grammatical case for nouns and/or pronouns. The dative generally marks the indirect object of a verb. Other uses include possession, as in Vulgar Latin and, to a lesser extent, Classical Latin; also, in Classical Greek, which has lost pronouns in English and could arguably be classified in the oblique caseIn linguistics, an oblique case is a noun case that is used generally when a noun is the predicate of a sentence or a preposition. An oblique case can appear in any case relationship except the nominative case of a sentence subject or the vocative case of instead. Most modern English grammarians feel that due to the lack of declension except in a few pronouns, where accusative and dative have been merged, that making case distinctions in English is no longer relevant, and frequently employ the term objectiveThe word objective means any of several things: It has several dictionary definitions, such as goal or fair''. See project objective, design objective, and Wiktionary:Objective. In philosophy, it can refer to the nature of an object or reality. See object instead (see Declension in EnglishThe English language once had an extensive declension system similar to modern German or Icelandic. Old English distinguished between the nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, and instrumental cases. Declension fell into disuse during the Middle Engli).
Example
I see the car. Here, the car is the direct object of the verb "see". In English, which has mostly lost the case system, the definite article and noun — "the car" — remain in the same form regardless of the grammatical role played by the words. One can correctly use "the car" as the subject of a sentence also: "The car is parked here."
In a declined language, the morphologyMorphology is a subdiscipline of linguistics that studies word structure. Words are at the interface between phonology, syntax and semantics (Spencer / Zwicky). There are many current approaches to morphology. For expository purposes, this article will de of the article and/or noun change in some way according to the grammatical role played by the noun in a given sentence. For example, in German, one possible translation of "the car" is der Wagen. This is the form in nominative caseThe nominative case is a grammatical case for a noun. Some writers on English use the term subjective case instead of nominative, in order to draw attention to the differences between the "standard" generic nominative and the way it is used in English., used for the subject of a sentence. If this article/noun pair is used as the object of a verb, it (usually) changes to the accusative case, which entails an article shift in German — Ich sehe den Wagen. In German, masculine nouns change their definite article from der to den in accusative case.
See also Morphosyntactic alignmentIn linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the system used to distinguish arguments of transitive verbs and intransitive verbs. Transitive verbs usually have two arguments, the agent and the patient (often imprecisely termed subject and object in Englis.
Grammatical cases
