accusative (adj./n.)

(acc, ACC) In languages which express GRAMMATICAL relationships by means of INFLECTIONS, this term refers to the FORM taken by a NOUN PHRASE (often a single noun or PRONOUN) when it is the OBJECT of a VERB. In Latin, for example, I see the man would be Video hominem and not *Video homo, and hominem would be referred to as being ‘in the accusative CASE’. LINGUISTS emphasize that it can be misleading to use such terms as ‘accusative’ in languages which do not inflect words in this way. In English, for instance, whether a word is the object of the verb or not usually depends on WORD-ORDER, as in Dog bites postman, where the recipient of the action is plainly the postman. Some traditional grammars would say here that postman is therefore ‘accusative’, but as there is no formal change between this word’s use as object and its use as SUBJECT (Postman bites dog) linguists argue that this is a misleading use of the term, and avoid using it in such contexts. The only instance of a genuine accusative form of a word in English is in some PRONOUNS, e.g. He saw him, She saw her, The man whom I saw, and even here many linguists would prefer to use a neutral term, such as ‘OBJECTIVE case’, to avoid the connotations of TRADITIONAL GRAMMARS. A distinction is often made between accusative languages (where subjects and objects can be distinguished using morphological or abstract cases) and ERGATIVE languages; ergative verbs are sometimes called UNACCUSATIVE verbs. In accounts which rely on an abstract notion of case, verbs which take objects are sometimes called accusative verbs.