Search results for 'tag:Nominative tag:Word order' matching tags 'Nominative' and 'Word order'

Re: Nominative and objective case

AlpheccaStars — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 02:13:25 GMT

We certainly don't want you to flunk!

First, you have to know what a noun is and what a pronoun is.

A noun is a person, place or thing, like a house, a dog, a pen, a computer, or the Internet.

A pronoun is a word that substitutes for a noun. "I" substitutes for AlpheccaStars. "You" substitutes for "Anonymous" Other pronouns are: he, she, it, they, someone, anybody....

Now when we use a noun in a sentence, it has a place. And the place we put it determines its case.

Nominative case is also called subject case (before the verb or after certain verbs where the subject noun is the same person or thing as the noun after the verb. I am AlpheccaStars. He is superman.).

Possessive case is when one noun owns another noun - The man's name. (Man's is possessive case. )

Objective case is everything else - it can be direct object, indirect object, or object of a preposition.

The dog bit the man. (dog is nominative case, man is objective case)

He bit the man.

The dog bit him. You see that He is nominative case, and we use a different word (him) to mean that "he" is in objective case. The change in the word happens for pronouns, not for nouns, as you see below. In ENglish, the word order in a sentence is very important.

The man bit the dog.

Re: Grammatical Cases and the English Language

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 11:46:43 GMT

There are precious few relics of the Dative case remaining in Modern English. The word whom is currently in its death throes and has been for 100 years or so; and in serious (and possibly fatal) decline during the last fifty.

But it must be remembered that whom is not a resident purely of the Dative domain; rather it is (or has become over several hundred years) an indicator to a large extent of any of the non-nominative cases.

All that said, English now relies heavily on word order and prepositions to express the different cases. Along with common sense, of course: "The rose gives the boy a girl"--a cannonical Latin example--makes no sense in English and causes us to abandon our automatic mechanisms of language comprehension in favor of more conscious, more forensic dissection of the phrase in an attempt to understand what is being said. Naturally, with no native dative case in English, and without the aid of prepositions, this sentence will languish in ambiguity and we will never be certain who is giving the rose to whom.

That is, until the Latin is given: Rosam pueri puella dat.

...well that clever little girl!

Help with nominative-accusative case.

M. Caliban — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 13:59:05 GMT

Although I'm a native English speaker, I've often struggled to understand English grammar, especially its morphosyntatical elements. I've done some reading on nominative-accusative as well as ergative-absolutive cases and I just don't get it.

Can someone who's better at linguistics explain this to me?

I understand that a sentence has a Subject, a Verb, and an Object. (John sees fish) I understand that a verb can be transitive, in that it demands both subject and object, or intransitive, in that it won't accept an object.

For example, 'to see' is transitive in that John (the subject) has to see something (the direct object), he can't 'just see.' On the other hand, 'to sleep' is intransitive in that John can 'just sleep' but he can't sleep a direct object.

1a: John sees fish.

1b: John sees.

2a: John sleeps fish

2b: John sleeps.

Therefore, 1a and 2b are right. 2a is never right and 1b is only right if you want to interpret it as actually saying, "John does see."

As I understand it, nominative-accusative case is when a language 'marks' the direct object of a transitive verb. So, if my mark was '-do' then I could say:

1. John sees fish.

2. John fish-do sees.

3. Fish-do sees John.

4. Sees fish-do John.

And all of them would mean the same thing. Word order doesn't matter now as no matter where I scatter the word fish the -do tells me what its function in the sentence is.

My problem (took me long enough, didn't it?) is that English is described as having a vestigial normative-accusative case in its use of pronouns and passive voice but I don't see it. Can someone explain how normative-accusative applies to the English language?

Re: He or him which is correct?/ passive

paco2004 — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 01:57:20 GMT

As to this, I'd like to put my two cents.

When English retained cases explicitly, the subject noun and the complement noun linked by a linking verb were both in nominative cases. So, "I [Nom] am the king [Nom]". If we change "the king" into a pronoun, it should be "I am it [Nom]" in the normal word order. However, in Old English, inversion easily took place between the subject and the complement. So the sentence was often uttered like "It (=complement) am I (=subject)". This style of sentence continued to be spoken until 14 century. But partly because of degradation of case declension and partly of French influence, English changed gradually into an analytical language where it is a rule the subject comes before the complement. Consequently, in the period of Middle English, some people interpreted erroneously "It am I" as "It (=subject) am I (=complement)" and they felt "am" should be changed into "is" to make it grammatical. Thus "It is I" was created in 14 century, and this is still now deemed as a correct form by the people who want to keep traditional grammar. "It is me" first appeared in literature in 17 century. The creation of this sentence seems to come from the result some people neglected the grammatical difference between linking verbs and usual action verbs. In English the sentence using a usual action verb comprises as; subject + verb + noun in the objective case. So those people erroneously thought "It is I" should be "It is me" because, they thought, "I" must be in the objective case.

What I have learned from this story is that changes in a language often occur as a result of people's ignorance (or negligence) of the grammar established by their ancestors, be it good or bad.

paco