Editing Accusative case (section)

{{Short description|Grammatical case used to receive the direct object of a transitive verb}}
{{More citations needed|date=July 2019}}
In [[grammar]], the '''accusative case''' ([[list of glossing abbreviations|abbreviated]] {{sc|'''acc'''}}) of a [[noun]] is the [[grammatical case]] used to receive the [[direct object]] of a [[transitive verb]].

In the [[English language]], the only words that occur in the accusative case are [[pronouns]]: "me", "him", "her", "us", "whom", and "them". For example, the pronoun ''she'', as the subject of a [[clause]], is in the nominative case ("She wrote a book"); but if the pronoun is instead the object of the verb, it is in the accusative case and ''she'' becomes ''her'' ("Fred greeted her").<ref>Huddleston, Rodney. Pullum, Geoffrey. ''A Student's Introduction to English Grammar''. Cambridge University Press. 2015. P. 106. {{ISBN|978-1009088015}}</ref>  For compound direct objects, it would be, e.g., "Fred invited her and me to the party".

The accusative case is used in many languages for the objects of (some or all) [[prepositions]]. It is usually combined with the [[nominative case]] (for example in [[Latin]]).

The English term, "accusative", derives from the Latin {{wikt-lang|la|accusativus}}, which, in turn, is a translation of the Greek {{wikt-lang|grc|αἰτιατική}}. The word can also mean "causative", and that might have derived from the Greeks,<ref>{{Cite web |title=accusative |url=https://www.etymonline.com/word/accusative |access-date= |website=[[Online Etymology Dictionary]] |language=en}}</ref> but the sense of the Roman translation has endured and is used in some other modern languages as the grammatical term for this case, for example in Russian ({{wikt-lang|ru|винительный}}).

The accusative case is typical of early [[Indo-European languages]] and still exists in some of them (including [[Albanian language|Albanian]], [[Armenian language|Armenian]], Latin, [[Sanskrit]], [[Greek language|Greek]], [[German language|German]], [[Nepali language|Nepali]], [[Polish language|Polish]], [[Romanian language|Romanian]], [[Russian language|Russian]], [[Serbian language|Serbian]], and [[Ukrainian language|Ukrainian]]), in the [[Finno-Ugric languages]] (such as Finnish and Hungarian), in all [[Turkic languages]], in [[Dravidian languages]] like [[Malayalam]] and [[Tamil language|Tamil]], and in [[Semitic languages]] (such as [[Arabic]]). Some [[Balto-Finnic languages]], such as Finnish, have two cases for objects, the accusative and the [[partitive case]]. In [[morphosyntactic alignment]] terms, both do the accusative function, but the accusative object is [[Telicity|telic]], while the partitive is not.

Modern English almost entirely lacks [[declension]] in its nouns; pronouns, however, have an understood case usage, as in ''them'', ''her'', ''him'' and ''whom'', which merges the accusative and [[dative case|dative]] functions, and originates in old Germanic dative forms (see [[Declension in English]]).