What is "accusative case"

alt. (context grammar English): case used to mark the immediate object (direct object) on which the action or influence of a transitive verb has its limited influence. n. (context grammar English): case used to mark the immediate object (direct object) on which the action or influence of a transitive verb has its limited influence.

n. the category of nouns serving as the direct object of a verb [syn: accusative, objective case]

The accusative case ( abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of (some or all) prepositions. It is a noun that is having something done to it, usually used together (such as in Latin) with the nominative case. For example, "they" in English is nominative; "them" is accusative. The sentence "They like them" clearly shows the nominative case and accusative case working in conjunction using the same base word. The syntactic functions of the accusative consist of designating the immediate object of an action, the intended result, the goal of a motion, and the extent of an action.

The accusative case existed in Proto-Indo-European and is present in some Indo-European languages (including Latin, Sanskrit, Greek, German, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Ukrainian), in the Uralic languages, in Altaic languages, and in Semitic languages (such as Hebrew and Classical Arabic). Finnic languages, such as Finnish and Estonian, have two cases to mark objects, the accusative and the partitive case. In morphosyntactic alignment terms, both perform the accusative function, but the accusative object is telic, while the partitive is not.

Modern English, which almost entirely lacks declension in its nouns, does not have an explicitly marked accusative case even in the pronouns. Such forms as whom, them, and her derive rather from the old Germanic dative forms, of which the -m and -r endings are characteristic. This conflation of the old accusative, dative, instrumental, and (after prepositions) genitive cases is the oblique case. Most modern English grammarians no longer use the Latin accusative/dative model, though they tend to use the terms objective for oblique, subjective for nominative, and possessive for genitive (see Declension in English). Hine, a true accusative masculine third person singular pronoun, is attested in some northern English dialects as late as the 19th century.