nominativegenitiveaccusative

Nominativegenitiveaccusative is a shorthand reference to three grammatical cases commonly found in Indo-European languages: nominative, genitive, and accusative. These cases are markers in a language’s morphology that indicate different semantic or syntactic roles for nouns and pronouns. In many languages, the nominative marks the subject of a finite verb, the accusative marks direct objects, and the genitive expresses possession or close association rather than a direct object function.

In practice, the three cases appear with different inflectional paradigms across languages. For example, Latin shows nominative puella, accusative puellam, and genitive puellae to express subject, direct object, and possession respectively. German uses der Mann (nominative), den Mann (accusative), des Mannes (genitive) to signal the same relationships. English relies less on noun inflection and uses case mainly in pronouns (nominative I, he; accusative me, him) and a possessive/genitive form (my, your, his) or periphrastic constructions such as “of the man.”

Beyond simple subject–object relations, the genitive often encodes possession, origin, or association, and can interact with prepositional phrases or other syntactic structures. Many languages with nominative-accusative alignment exhibit symmetrical treatment of intransitive and transitive subjects in the nominative, while the object of transitive verbs appears in the accusative. The terms nominative, genitive, and accusative derive from Latin nomenclature and are used by linguists to describe cross-linguistic case patterns and their functions.