Nominative-accusative language

The nominative-accusive morphosinacetic alignment, with explicit case marking, is indicated by circles (marked accusative) and blue rombos (marked name).

A nominative-accusative language (or simply accusative ) is one in which the subject of an intransitive verb (S role) and the subject of a transitive verb (role A) are treated differently from the direct object of the transitive verb (role O). The treatment may consist of giving it a special case affix, in the grammatical order or another procedure to distinguish the function of each verbal argument. That is, a nominative language treats S and A in the same way and O differently. In nominative-accusative languages with a grammatical case S and A are usually marked with a nominative case and O with an accusative case, hence the name. If there is no case mark, the language uses word order (as in English, where the subject comes before the verb and the object comes after).

All European languages, except Basque, are nominative-accusative. This type of languages contrasts with those of the ergative type. In this other type of language S and O are treated in the same way, generally marked with absolutive case, leaving the ergative case for A marking. Hence these languages are also called absolutive-ergative.

Examples

The nominative-accusative alignment is very clearly seen in case languages like Latin or many other ancient Indo-European languages. In these languages it can be seen that the subject of transitive verbs (1b) receives the same case marking as the subject of intransitive verbs (1a) (this case is usually called nominative), while the object of transitive verbs receives a different mark (accusative):

(Latin)

(1a) homo pervenit = 'man has come'

(1b) homo puerum vidit = 'Man has seen the boy'

(1c) puer hominem vidit = 'The boy has seen the man'

This contrasts with an ergative-absolutive language like Basque:

(euskera)

(2a) gizona etorri da = 'man has come'

(2b) gizonak mutilation ikusi = 'Man has seen the boy'

(2c) mutilak gizona ikusi = 'The boy has seen the man'

As can be seen, the Basque words in red such as "gizona" (suj.), "mutilatea" (obj.), "gizona" (obj.), they all end exactly the same (-a), which corresponds to the definition of ergative language, in that the subject of an intransitive verb, such as "gizona " (suj.), receives the same treatment as the object of a transitive verb, such as "mutila" (obj.) and "gizona" (obj.); it is the opposite of what happens in languages like Latin that are nominative-accusative.