Nominative case
The
nominative case (also called the
first case) is a
grammatical case for a
noun, which generally marks the
subject of a
verb, as opposed to its
object or other
verb arguments.
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
inflection; alternatively, it may said to be marked by a
null morpheme. Moreover, in most languages with a nominative case, the nominative form is the
lemma; that is, it is the one used to cite a word, to list it as a dictionary entry, etc.
Nominative cases are found in
Latin,
Icelandic 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 term "nominative case" is most properly used in the discussion of
nominative-accusative languages, such as Latin,
Greek, and most modern Western European languages. Some writers on
English employ 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.
In
active-stative languages there is a case sometimes called nominative which is the
most marked case, and is used for the subject of a
transitive verb or a voluntary subject of an
intransitive verb, but not for an involuntary subject of an intransitive verb; since such languages are a relatively new field of study, there is no standard name for this case.
*
Morphosyntactic alignment*
Nominative Case In Russian
