accusative
/əˈkjuːzətɪv
/Grammar
adjective
(In Latin, Greek, German, and some other languages) denoting a case of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives which expresses the object of an action or the goal of motion.In ordinary English this is a function that goes with accusative case on a pronoun: if you knock on my door and I call out Who is it?...
- So long as the payoff phrase is not actually a subject (even though it's interpreted as the subject), the basic case rule would predict accusative case.
- However, when studying German I was taught some grammar: so I thus learned the difference between a past tense and a past participle, and the difference between the nominative and the accusative cases.
noun
1A word in the accusative case.Recall the fictional judge objecting to splitting in court, in one of the Rumpole stories; he used an accusative in a gerund object, even for a pronoun,...
- Gildersleeve and Lodge also point out that the Romans sometimes took the accusative of the Greek word to be the stem.
- These would include the nominative (for the subject of a sentence), the accusative (for its object) and the genitive (to indicate possession).
1.1 (the accusative) The accusative case.The nominal system distinguishes five cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative; the genitive and dative endings are always the same....
- As students of the language may recall, German has four cases - nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative - which see words change in order to explain their relationship to each other.
- Classical Mongolian had seven cases, all clearly distinguished, in contrast to Latin: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, ablative, instrumental, and comitative.
Origin
Late Middle English: from Latin (casus) accusativus, literally 'relating to an accusation or (legal) case', translating Greek (ptōsis) aitiatikē '(the case) showing cause'.