The accusitive case

The accusitve case. Could you write me three or four short sentences using the accusitive case?

Appreciated

H.M. Hall

whl, how can you see if it's dative or accusative??

I learned at school, that there's just an object-case in English that doesn't differenciate between dative and accusative.
I'd like to know if and how you can distinguish those two cases, thx a lot

So how can you see then whether a verb needs a dative or an accusative pronoun?
I mean there's no change in the form of the pronoun or any other noun in a sentence so how can you see what case is used?

So would something be a pronoun in the accusative case if I said: "I built something"?
Also there's no change in personal pronouns in these cases, e.g. if you said:
"I will help her" and "I can see her"
In German you can see the difference in these sentences:
"Ich werde ihr helfen" and "Ich kann sie sehen":
'ihr' in the first sentence is the personal pronoun in its dative case (because the verb helfen reigns the dative) while 'sie' in the 2nd sentence is the pronoun in its accusative case (because the verb sehen reigns the accusative).

Is there any way in English that you can see whether it's dative or accusative?
Thanks for your reply.

The first thing to note is the spelling: the correct spelling is a-c-c-u-s-a-t-i-v-e. Another thing to note is that the term often employed to identify the "case" of words like "him", "her" and "whom" is Objective, rather than Accusative (which is misleading in a simplified grammar like English's.)

Unlike German, English doesn't really have a well-developed Dative or Accusative case. We used to have those cases at an earlier stage of the language's development, but now those cases are only vestigial. Our "allgemein" Objective case, where it exists at all, performs both Dative and Accusative functions. What gives you the difference in meaning is generally word order.

For example, in the sentence "I gave him a spoon" -- which in German would be something like "Ich gab ihm einen Loeffel" -- "him" is a word in the Objective case, but it is clearly performing a dative function here. If you want to, you can decide that "him" is in the Dative case, but in English grammar it doesn't make much sense to think of a Dative case. We know that "him" is the indirect object of the verb -- i.e., performs a dative function -- because it *precedes* what is obviously the direct object, "spoon". Note that "spoon", the direct object, is unmarked by case ending, unlike the German.

On the other hand, in a sentence like "I saw him yesterday" -- which in German would be "Ich sah ihn gestern" -- it's the same word "him", in the same Objective case, but since there is no possible role for "him" in this sentence other than the direct object, you know that it has to be the direct object.

In American English, the normal practice would be for indirect objects to precede the direct objects: "I gave him a spoon." In British English -- or so I believe -- sometimes the practice is the opposite: the British might say "I gave it him" -- where "it" (the direct object) comes first.

Hope this helps.

Mike