Accusative case

In grammar, the accusative case (abbreviated 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"). For compound direct objects, it would be, e.g., "Fred invited me and her 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 accusativus, which, in turn, is a translation of the Greek αἰτιατική. The word can also mean "causative", and that might have derived from the Greeks, 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 (винительный).

The accusative case is typical of early Indo-European languages and still exists in some of them (including Albanian, Armenian, Latin, Sanskrit, Greek, German, Nepali, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian), in the Finno-Ugric languages (such as Finnish and Hungarian), in all Turkic languages, in Dravidian languages like Malayalam and 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 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 functions, and originates in old Germanic dative forms (see Declension in English).

In the sentence The man sees the dog, the dog is the direct object of the verb "to see". In English, which has mostly lost grammatical cases, the definite article and noun – "the dog" – remain the same noun form without number agreement in the noun either as subject or object, though an artifact of it is in the verb and has number agreement, which changes to "sees". One can also correctly use "the dog" as the subject of a sentence: "The dog sees the cat."

In a declined language, the morphology of the article or noun changes with gender agreement. For example, in German, "the dog" is der Hund. This is the form in the 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 – Der Mann sieht den Hund (The man sees the dog). In German, masculine nouns change their definite article from der to den in the accusative case. In Nepali, "Rama sees Shyama" would be translated as रामले श्यामलाई देख्छ। Rama-le Shyama-lai dekhchha. The same sentence in Sanskrit would be रामः पश्यति श्यामम्। Rama: pashyati Shyamam.