NominativeAccusative

Nominative-accusative alignment is a morphosyntactic pattern used to describe how languages mark the subjects and objects of verbs. In this system, the subject of an intransitive verb and the subject of a transitive verb are treated the same way in terms of grammatical marking (nominative), while the direct object receives a different marking (accusative).

In practice, languages with nominative-accusative alignment may mark cases on nouns or rely on pronoun inflections and verb agreement to indicate function. The key distinction is between the nominative subject and the accusative object, rather than any fixed word order. Some languages use explicit case endings on nouns; others depend more on pronoun forms or syntactic position. The presence or absence of overt case markers does not by itself determine the alignment.

Classic examples include many Indo-European languages such as Latin, German, and Russian, which employ distinct nominative and accusative forms to differentiate subjects from objects. English displays a weakened form of this pattern, evident primarily in pronoun case (I versus me, he versus him), while nouns often lack distinctive endings. Some languages have rich case systems that offer multiple nominative or accusative forms depending on agreement or nuance.

Nominative-accusative contrast is one of the main typological alignments, contrasted with ergative-absolutive systems where the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb share a common case. Some languages exhibit split or mixed alignments, applying nominative-accusative in some domains and ergative in others.