In grammar, an oblique (abbreviated OBL; from Latin : casus obliquus) or objective case (abbr. OBJ) is a nominal case other than the nominative case and, sometimes, the vocative.
A noun or pronoun in the oblique case can generally appear in any role except as subject, for which the nominative case is used. [1] The term objective case is generally preferred by modern English grammarians, where it supplanted Old English's dative and accusative. [2] [3] When the two terms are contrasted, they differ in the ability of a word in the oblique case to function as a possessive attributive; whether English has an oblique rather than an objective case then depends on how "proper" or widespread one considers the dialects where such usage is employed.
An oblique case often contrasts with an unmarked case, as in English oblique him and them versus nominative he and they. However, the term oblique is also used for languages without a nominative case, such as ergative–absolutive languages; in the Northwest Caucasian languages, for example, the oblique-case marker serves to mark the ergative, dative, and applicative case roles, contrasting with the absolutive case, which is unmarked.
Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu) nouns, pronouns and postpositions decline for an oblique case which exclusively serves to mark the grammatical case roles using the case-marking postpositions. [4] [5] [6] [7] The oblique case has similarities with the vocative case in Hindustani. Some examples of the declension pattern are shown in the tables below: [8]
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Singular pronouns are shown. | लड़का (laṛkā) = boy, लड़की (laṛkī) = girl | का (kā) is equivalent to the possessive 's of English |
Bulgarian, an analytic Slavic language, also has an oblique case form for pronouns:
Dative role:
(This oblique case is a relic of the original, more complex proto-Slavic system of noun cases, and there are remnants of other cases in Bulgarian, such as the vocative case of direct address)
An objective case is marked on the English personal pronouns and as such serves the role of the accusative and dative cases that other Indo-European languages employ. These forms are often called object pronouns. They serve a variety of grammatical functions which they would not in languages that differentiate the two. An example using first person singular objective pronoun me:
The pronoun me is not inflected differently in any of these uses; it is used for all grammatical relationships except the genitive case of possession (in standard English) and a non-disjunctive nominative case as the subject.
Old French had a nominative case and an oblique case, called cas sujet and cas régime respectively.
In Modern French, the two cases have mostly merged and the cas régime has survived as the sole form for the majority of nouns. For example, the word "conte (count, earl)":
In some cases, both the cas sujet and cas régime of one noun have survived but produced two nouns in Modern French with different meanings. For example, today's copain means "friend" and compagnon means "companion", but in Old French these were different declensions of the same noun.
Kurdish has an oblique for pronouns, objects, and for objects of izafe constructs.
In grammar, the accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to receive the direct object of a transitive verb.
In grammar, the dative case is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "Maria Jacobo potum dedit", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob a drink". In this example, the dative marks what would be considered the indirect object of a verb in English.
In linguistics, declension is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and determiners to indicate number, case, gender, and a number of other grammatical categories. Meanwhile, the inflectional change of verbs is called conjugation.
A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers that corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nominal groups consisting of a noun and its modifiers belong to one of a few such categories. For instance, in English, one says I see them and they see me: the nominative pronouns I/they represent the perceiver and the accusative pronouns me/them represent the phenomenon perceived. Here, nominative and accusative are cases, that is, categories of pronouns corresponding to the functions they have in representation.
Latin declension is the set of patterns according to which Latin words are declined—that is, have their endings altered to show grammatical case, number and gender. Nouns, pronouns, and adjectives are declined, and a given pattern is called a declension. There are five declensions, which are numbered and grouped by ending and grammatical gender. Each noun follows one of the five declensions, but some irregular nouns have exceptions.
In grammar, the nominative case, subjective case, straight case, or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb, or a predicative nominal or adjective, as opposed to its object, or other verb arguments. Generally, the noun "that is doing something" is in the nominative, and the nominative is often the form listed in dictionaries.
Latin is a heavily inflected language with largely free word order. Nouns are inflected for number and case; pronouns and adjectives are inflected for number, case, and gender; and verbs are inflected for person, number, tense, aspect, voice, and mood. The inflections are often changes in the ending of a word, but can be more complicated, especially with verbs.
Case roles, according to the work by Charles J. Fillmore (1967), are the semantic roles of noun phrases (NP) in relation to the syntactic structures that contain these noun phrases. The term case role is most widely used for purely semantic relations, including theta roles and thematic roles, that can be independent of the morpho-syntax. The concept of case roles is related to the larger notion of Case, which is defined as a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of semantic or syntactic relationship they bear to their heads. Case traditionally refers to inflectional marking.
In linguistics, an object pronoun is a personal pronoun that is used typically as a grammatical object: the direct or indirect object of a verb, or the object of a preposition. Object pronouns contrast with subject pronouns. Object pronouns in English take the objective case, sometimes called the oblique case or object case. For example, the English object pronoun me is found in "They see me", "He's giving me my book", and "Sit with me" ; this contrasts with the subject pronoun in "I see them," "I am getting my book," and "I am sitting here."
In linguistic typology, ergative–absolutive alignment is a type of morphosyntactic alignment in which the single argument ("subject") of an intransitive verb behaves like the object of a transitive verb, and differently from the agent ("subject") of a transitive verb. Examples include Basque, Georgian, Mayan, Tibetan, and certain Indo-European languages. It has also been attributed to the Semitic modern Aramaic languages. Ergative languages are classified into two groups: those that are morphologically ergative but syntactically behave as accusative and those that, on top of being ergative morphologically, also show ergativity in syntax. No language has been recorded in which both the morphological and syntactical ergative are present. Languages that belong to the former group are more numerous than those to the latter. Dyirbal is said to be the only representative of syntactic ergativity, yet it displays accusative alignment with certain pronouns.
The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and Middle English.
Standard Romanian shares largely the same grammar and most of the vocabulary and phonological processes with the other three surviving varieties of Eastern Romance, namely Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian.
Georgian grammar has many distinctive and extremely complex features, such as split ergativity and a polypersonal verb agreement system.
Romanian nouns, under the rules of Romanian grammar, are declined, varying by gender, number, and case.
Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person, second person, or third person. Personal pronouns may also take different forms depending on number, grammatical or natural gender, case, and formality. The term "personal" is used here purely to signify the grammatical sense; personal pronouns are not limited to people and can also refer to animals and objects.
Hindustani, the lingua franca of Northern India and Pakistan, has two standardised registers: Hindi and Urdu. Grammatical differences between the two standards are minor but each uses its own script: Hindi uses Devanagari while Urdu uses an extended form of the Perso-Arabic script, typically in the Nastaʿlīq style.
The grammar of the Marathi language shares similarities with other modern Indo-Aryan languages such as Odia, Gujarati or Punjabi. The first modern book exclusively about the grammar of Marathi was printed in 1805 by Willam Carey.
Gothic is an inflected language, and as such its nouns, pronouns, and adjectives must be declined in order to serve a grammatical function. A set of declined forms of the same word pattern is called a declension. There are five grammatical cases in Gothic with a few traces of an old sixth instrumental case.
The personal pronouns and possessives in Modern Standard Hindi of the Hindustani language display a higher degree of inflection than other parts of speech. Personal pronouns have distinct forms according to whether they stand for a subject (nominative), a direct object (accusative), an indirect object (dative), or a reflexive object. Pronouns further have special forms used with postpositions.
Hindi-Urdu, also known as Hindustani, has three noun cases and five pronoun cases. The oblique case in pronouns has three subdivisions: Regular, Ergative, and Genitive. There are eight case-marking postpositions in Hindi and out of those eight the ones which end in the vowel -ā also decline according to number, gender, and case.