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The nominative case is a grammatical case
Grammatical case

In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun indicates its grammatical function in a greater phrase or clause; such as the role of subject , of direct object, or of possession ....
 for a noun
Noun

In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open class lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition....
, which generally marks the subject
Subject (grammar)

The subject is one of the two main constituent every sentence can be divided into, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle....
 of a verb
Verb

In syntax, a verb is a word that usually denotes an action , an occurrence , or a state of being . Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its grammatical tense, grammatical aspect, grammatical mood and grammatical voice....
, as opposed to its object
Object (grammar)

An object in grammar is a sentence element and part of the sentence Predicate . It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's "performance" of the verb....
 or other verb argument
Verb argument

In linguistics, a verb argument is a phrase that appears in a syntax relationship with the verb in a clause. In English language, for example, the two most important arguments are the subject and the direct object ....
s. (Basically, it is a noun that is doing something, usually joined (such as in Latin
Latin

Latin is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Military history of the Roman Empire, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe....
) with the accusative case
Accusative case

The accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions....
.)

Linguistic characteristics
The nominative case is the usual, natural form (more technically, the least marked
Markedness

Markedness is a Linguistics concept that developed out of the Prague School. A marked form is a non-basic or less natural form. An unmarked form is a basic, default form....
) of certain parts of speech, such as nouns, adjectives, pronouns and less frequently numerals and participles, and sometimes does not indicate any special relationship with other parts of speech.






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The nominative case is a grammatical case
Grammatical case

In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun indicates its grammatical function in a greater phrase or clause; such as the role of subject , of direct object, or of possession ....
 for a noun
Noun

In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open class lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition....
, which generally marks the subject
Subject (grammar)

The subject is one of the two main constituent every sentence can be divided into, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle....
 of a verb
Verb

In syntax, a verb is a word that usually denotes an action , an occurrence , or a state of being . Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its grammatical tense, grammatical aspect, grammatical mood and grammatical voice....
, as opposed to its object
Object (grammar)

An object in grammar is a sentence element and part of the sentence Predicate . It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's "performance" of the verb....
 or other verb argument
Verb argument

In linguistics, a verb argument is a phrase that appears in a syntax relationship with the verb in a clause. In English language, for example, the two most important arguments are the subject and the direct object ....
s. (Basically, it is a noun that is doing something, usually joined (such as in Latin
Latin

Latin is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Military history of the Roman Empire, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe....
) with the accusative case
Accusative case

The accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions....
.)

Linguistic characteristics


The nominative case is the usual, natural form (more technically, the least marked
Markedness

Markedness is a Linguistics concept that developed out of the Prague School. A marked form is a non-basic or less natural form. An unmarked form is a basic, default form....
) of certain parts of speech, such as nouns, adjectives, pronouns and less frequently numerals and participles, and sometimes does not indicate any special relationship with other parts of speech. Therefore, in some languages the nominative case is unmarked, that is, the form or stem
Word stem

In linguistics, a stem is the part of a word that is common to all its inflection variants. Stems are often root , e.g. atomic, its root is atom, but its stem is atom?ic....
, with no inflection
Inflection

In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational categories such as grammatical tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, grammatical aspect, grammatical person, grammatical number, grammatical gender, grammatical case....
; alternatively, it may said to be marked by a zero morpheme. Moreover, in most languages with a nominative case, the nominative form is the lemma
Lemma (linguistics)

In linguistics a lemma has two distinct interpretations:# morphology / lexicography: the canonical form or citation form of a set of forms ; e.g....
; that is, it is the one used to cite a word, to list it as a dictionary entry, etc.

Nominative cases are found in Lithuanian
Lithuanian language

Lithuanian is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognised as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.96 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 170,000 abroad....
, German
German language

German is a West Germanic languages, thus related to and classified alongside English language and Dutch language. It is one of the world's world language and the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union....
, Latin
Latin

Latin is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Military history of the Roman Empire, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe....
, Icelandic
Icelandic language

Icelandic is a North Germanic languages, the language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese language and Norwegian dialects such as Telemark dialect and Sognam?l....
, Old English
Old English language

Old English is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and south-eastern Scotland between the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century....
, Polish
Polish language

Polish , an official language of Poland, has the largest number of speakers of any West Slavic languages. Polish-speakers use the language in a uniform manner through most of Poland, and it has a regular orthography....
, Czech
Czech language

Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czech people worldwide....
, Romanian
Romanian language

Romanian or Daco-Romanian ; self-designation: limba rom?na, ) is a Romance languages spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova....
 and Russian
Russian language

Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe....
, among other languages. English still retains some nominative pronoun
Pronoun

In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun with or without a Determiner , such as Wiktionary:you and Wiktionary:they in English language....
s, as opposed to the accusative case
Accusative case

The accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions....
 or oblique case
Oblique case

An oblique case in linguistics is a noun case of synthetic languages that is used generally when a noun is the object of a sentence or a preposition....
: I (accusative, me), we (accusative, us), he (accusative, him), she (accusative, her) and they (accusative, them). An archaic usage is the singular second-person pronoun thou
Thou

The word thou is a grammatical person grammatical number pronoun in English language. It is now largely archaism, having been replaced in almost all contexts by you....
 (accusative thee). A special case is the word you: Originally ye was its nominative form and you the accusative, but over time you has come to be used for the nominative as well.

The term "nominative case" is most properly used in the discussion of nominative-accusative language
Nominative-accusative language

A nominative?accusative language, or simply an accusative language, is a language that marks the object of transitive verbs distinguishing them from the subject of both transitive and intransitive verbs....
s, such as Latin, Greek
Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
, and most modern Western European languages.

In active-stative language
Active-stative language

An active?stative language, or an active language for short, is one in which the sole verb argument of an intransitive verb is sometimes marked in the same way as the agent of a transitive verb , and sometimes in the same way as the direct object of a transitive verb....
s there is a case sometimes called nominative which is the most marked case, and is used for the subject of a transitive verb
Transitive verb

In syntax, a transitive verb is a verb that requires both a direct subject and one or more object s....
 or a voluntary subject of an intransitive verb
Intransitive verb

In grammar, an intransitive verb does not take an Object . In more technical terms, an intransitive verb has only one verb argument , and hence has a valency of one....
, but not for an involuntary subject of an intransitive verb; since such languages are a relatively new field of study, there is no standard name for this case.

Subjective Case


Some writers of English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
 employ the term subjective case instead of nominative, in order to draw attention to the differences between the "standard" generic nominative and the way it is used in English.

Generally, when the term subjective case is used, the accusative
Accusative case

The accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions....
 and dative
Dative case

The dative case is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given. For example, in "John gave a book to Mary"....
 are collectively labelled as the objective case. This is possible in English because the two have merged; there are no surviving examples where the accusative and the dative are distinct in form, though their functions are still distinct. The genitive case
Genitive case

In grammar, the genitive case or possessive case is the grammatical case that marks a noun as modifying another noun. It often marks a noun as being the possessor of another noun but it can also indicate various relationships other than possession; certain verbs may take argument in the genitive case; and it may have adverbial uses ....
 is then usually called the possessive form and often is not considered as a noun case per se; English is then said to have two cases, the subjective and the objective. This view is an oversimplification, but it is didactically useful.

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