nominatíve

Nominatíve, or nominative case, is the grammatical category used to mark the subject of a finite verb in many languages. The term originates from Latin nominativus, meaning “named” or “designated,” reflecting its role in identifying the doer of an action or the entity described by a predicate. In languages with a developed case system, nominative forms appear as distinct endings on nouns, pronouns, and sometimes adjectives.

The primary function of the nominátíve is to indicate the grammatical subject of a clause. In languages with rich inflection, the subject noun phrase may also determine agreement on verbs and adjectives. Some languages extend the nominative to predicate nouns in equational sentences, while others reserve it strictly for the subject.

Morphology and agreement vary widely. In many Indo-European languages, nouns, adjectives, and pronouns change form to reflect number and gender in the nominátíve. For example, Latin marks the subject noun with endings such as -a in the nominátíve feminine singular, and German relies on the article and noun forms to signal the nominátíve in a sentence. In Slavic languages like Russian, the nominátíve is one of several case endings and interacts with verb agreement.

Examples illustrate usage: in English, the subject pronouns I, you, he, she, we, they are nominative forms, while me, him, her, us, them are non-nominative. Many languages still rely on explicit nominátíve endings for nouns and adjectives, while others use position or simplifying word order.

Historically, the nominative case is among the earliest grammatical cases and remains a key concept in descriptive grammars of many languages.