In Indo-Aryan languages, and Eastern Iranian languages, the direct case (abbreviated DIR) is the name given to a grammatical case used with all three core relations: the agent of transitive verbs, the patient of transitive verbs, and the argument of intransitive verbs. Such a case may also be called the nominative case, but some linguists reserve that term for cases that cover other roles or combinations of roles.
In languages of the Philippines and related languages with Austronesian alignment, the direct case, also called the absolutive, is the case of the argument of an intransitive clause, and may be used for either argument (agent or patient) of a transitive clause, depending on the voice of the verb. The other argument of a transitive clause may either be ergative or accusative, or in Tagalog a single case called indirect.
Famous quotes containing the words direct and/or case:
“Pleasure is the rock which most young people split upon; they launch out with crowded sails in quest of it, but without a compass to direct their course, or reason sufficient to steer the vessel; for want of which, pain and shame, instead of pleasure, are the returns of their voyage.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“In the case of our main stock of well-worn predicates, I submit that the judgment of projectibility has derived from the habitual projection, rather than the habitual projection from the judgment of projectibility. The reason why only the right predicates happen so luckily to have become well entrenched is just that the well entrenched predicates have thereby become the right ones.”
—Nelson Goodman (b. 1906)