nominativaccusativ

Nominativ-accusativ, usually written as nominative-accusative, refers to a common type of syntactic alignment in which the subjects of both intransitive and transitive verbs are treated the same (marked with the nominative case), while the direct object of transitive verbs is marked with the accusative case. In languages with overt case marking, the nominative marks the subject of a finite clause, and the accusative marks the direct object.

This alignment is contrasted with ergative-absolutive alignment, where the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb share an absolutive form, and the subject of a transitive verb takes a distinct ergative form. Nominative-accusative is the most widespread alignment across the world’s languages and is especially common in Indo-European and many other language families.

Examples can be seen in different languages. In German, a sentence like Der Mann sieht den Hund shows the subject Der Mann in the nominative and the object den Hund in the accusative. In English, the distinction is most evident in pronouns: I vs me, he vs him, while nouns generally do not carry explicit case endings.

Some languages combine nominative-accusative marking with other grammatical patterns. For instance, some languages exhibit split-ergativity, where the alignment changes depending on tense, aspect, or controllable versus uncontrolable transitivity. Others have rich nominal or pronominal case systems that clearly mark nominative and accusative forms, while still sharing the broader nominative-accusative pattern.

In linguistic typology, nominative-accusative is a foundational concept for describing how languages encode subject and object roles, as opposed to other alignment systems.