This MedLibrary.org supplementary page on Nominative case is provided directly from the open source Wikipedia as a service to our readers. Please see the note below on authorship of this content, as well as the Wikipedia usage guidelines. To search for other content from our encyclopedia supplement, please use the form below:
Related Sponsors
The nominative case is a grammatical case for a noun, which generally marks the subject of a verb, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments. (Basically, it is a noun that is doing something, usually joined (such as in Latin) with the accusative case.)
Linguistic characteristics
The nominative case is the usual, natural form (more technically, the least marked) of certain parts of speech, such as nouns, adjectives, pronouns and less frequently numerals and participles, and sometimes does not indicate any special relationship with other parts of speech. Therefore, in some languages the nominative case is unmarked, that is, the form or stem, with no inflection; alternatively, it may said to be marked by a zero morpheme. Moreover, in most languages with a nominative case, the nominative form is the lemma; that is, it is the one used to cite a word, to list it as a dictionary entry, etc.
Nominative cases are found in Lithuanian, German, Latin, Icelandic, Old English, Polish, Romanian and Russian, among other languages. English still retains some nominative pronouns, as opposed to the accusative case or oblique case: I (accusative, me), we (accusative, us), he (accusative, him), she (accusative, her) and they (accusative, them). An archaic usage is the singular second-person pronoun thou (accusative thee). A special case is the word you: Originally ye was its nominative form and you the accusative, but over time you has come to be used for the nominative as well.
The term "nominative case" is most properly used in the discussion of nominative-accusative languages, such as Latin, Greek, and most modern Western European languages.
In active-stative languages there is a case sometimes called nominative which is the most marked case, and is used for the subject of a transitive verb or a voluntary subject of an intransitive verb, but not for an involuntary subject of an intransitive verb; since such languages are a relatively new field of study, there is no standard name for this case.
Subjective Case
Some writers of English employ 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.
Generally, when the term subjective case is used, the accusative and dative are collectively labelled as the objective case. This is possible in English because the two have merged; there are no surviving examples where the accusative and the dative are distinct in form, though their functions are still distinct. The genitive case is then usually called the possessive form and often is not considered as a noun case per se; English is then said to have two cases, the subjective and the objective. This view is an oversimplification, but it is didactically useful.
External links
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 3 December 2008, at 11:08.
Wikipedia Authorship and Review
Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.
Wikipedia Usage Guidelines
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Nominative case".
The URL for this specific entry is:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.