nominativoacusativo

Nominativoacusativo, or nominative–accusative alignment, is a typological pattern describing how languages encode the subject and the object of verbs. In this system, the subject of both intransitive and transitive verbs takes the nominative case, while the direct object of transitive verbs takes the accusative case. The object of intransitive verbs is typically not marked by a special object case. This alignment relies primarily on morphology to signal grammatical roles, though word order can still vary.

Languages with nominative–accusative alignment commonly mark nouns and pronouns for case, facilitating clear distinction between subject and object across clauses. Examples include Latin (Puella librum amat; Puella ambulat), German (Der Mann isst den Apfel), Russian (Мальчик читает книгу), and Turkish (Adam kitabı okuyor). In each case, the subject tends to be in the nominative form, while the direct object bears the accusative form.

Nominative–accusative is often contrasted with ergative–absolutive alignment, where the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb share an absolutive case, and the agent of a transitive verb is marked differently (ergative). Some languages exhibit split or mixed systems, employing nominative–accusative in some domains and ergative or another pattern in others.

In linguistic analysis, nominative–accusative provides a straightforward framework for classifying languages by how they assign grammatical roles to nouns and pronouns, influencing morphology, syntax, and historical change.