Online Encyclopedia
Nominative case
| Grammatical cases |
|---|
| List of grammatical cases |
| Abessive case |
| Ablative case |
| Absolutive case |
| Adessive case |
| Allative case |
| Causal case |
| Causal-final case |
| Comitative case |
| Dative case |
| Dedative case |
| Delative case |
| Disjunctive case |
| Distributive case |
| Distributive-temporal case |
| Elative case |
| Essive case |
| Essive-formal case |
| Essive-modal case |
| Excessive case |
| Final case |
| Formal case |
| Genitive case |
| Illative case |
| Inessive case |
| Instructive case |
| Instrumental case |
| Lative case |
| Locative case |
| Modal case |
| Multiplicative case |
| Oblique case |
| Objective case |
| Partitive case |
| Possessive case |
| Postpositional case |
| Prepositional case |
| Prolative case |
| Prosecutive case |
| Separative case |
| Sociative case |
| Sublative case |
| Superessive case |
| Temporal case |
| Terminative case |
| Translative case |
| Vialis case |
| Vocative case |
| Morphosyntactic alignment |
| Absolutive case |
| Accusative case |
| Ergative case |
| Instrumental case |
| Instrumental-comitative case |
| Intransitive case |
| Nominative case |
| Declension |
| Declension in English |
The nominative case is a grammatical case for a noun. Some writers on English use 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.
The nominative marks, generally, the subject of a verb. Nominative cases are found in Latin and Old English, 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 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 nominative word is the base form or stem, with no flexion. Moreover, in most languages with a nominative case, the nominative form is the one used to cite a word, to list it as a dictionary entry, etc.
In nominative-absolutive languages, the nominative case marks the subject of a transitive verb or a voluntary subject of an intransitive verb, but not an involuntary subject of an intransitive verb (for whom the absolutive case is used).