Accusative Case - Description

Description

In the sentence He sees the woman, "he" is the subject of the sentence, while in The woman sees him, "him" is the object. In English we distinguish the two uses by different forms of the pronoun: he/him. If, however, instead of a pronoun, we use a noun, we make no such distinction in the form of the word. Thus, we use the same word "man" in both The man sees the woman and The woman sees the man. In many languages, however, different forms of the word are used not only for pronouns, but for nouns too. For example, in Latin The man sees the woman = Vir feminam videt, while The woman sees the man = Femina virum videt. For "man", Latin uses "vir" for the subject, and "virum" for the an object. Likewise, in the same pair of sentences, we have "femina" for a subject and "feminam" for object. The form used for the direct object ("him", "virum", "feminam") is known as the "accusative case", while the form used for the subject ("he", "vir", "femina") is known as the nominative case.

Just as with pronouns nouns, many inflected languages make distinctions between cases for adjectives and (for languages that have them) articles. Thus in German, "the car" as the subject of a sentence may be expressed as der Wagen. This is the form in the nominative case. If this article/noun pair is used as the object of a verb, becomes den Wagen, the accusative. In this example, the noun does not change, but the definite article is der in the nominative but den in the accusative case.