Accusative case: Encyclopedia II - Accusative case - Example

Accusative case - Example

In the sentence I see the car, the noun phrase the car is the direct object of the verb "see". In English, which has mostly lost the case system, the definite article and noun — "the car" — remain in the same form regardless of the grammatical role played by the words. One can correctly use "the car" as the subject of a sentence also: "The car is parked here."

In a declined language, the morphology of the article and/or noun changes in some way according to the grammatical role played by the noun in a given sentence. For example, in German, one possible translation of "the car" is der Wagen. This is the form in nominative case, used for the subject of a sentence. If this article/noun pair is used as the object of a verb, it (usually) changes to the accusative case, which entails an article shift in German — Ich sehe den Wagen. In German, masculine nouns change their definite article from der to den in accusative case.

See also Morphosyntactic alignment.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Example", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki