Nominative case

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Grammatical cases
List of grammatical cases
Abessive case
Ablative case
Absolutive case
Accusative case
Adessive case
Adverbial case
Allative case
Antessive case
Aversive case
Benefactive case
Caritive case
Causal case
Causal-final case
Comitative case
Dative case
Delative case
Direct case
Distantitive case
Distributive case
Distributive-temporal case
Dubitive case
Elative case
Essive case
Essive-formal case
Essive-modal case
Equative case
Evitative case
Excessive case
Final case
Formal case
Genitive case
Illative case
Inessive case
Instructive case
Instrumental case
Lative case
Locative case
Medial case
Modal case
Multiplicative case
Nominative case
Oblique case
Objective case
Partitive case
Perlative case
Postessive case
Possessive case
Postpositional case
Prepositional case
Privative case
Prolative case
Prosecutive case
Proximative case
Separative case
Sociative case
Subessive case
Sublative case
Superessive case
Superlative case
Temporal case
Terminative case
Translative case
Vialis case
Vocative case
Morphosyntactic alignment
Absolutive case
Accusative case
Ergative case
Instrumental case
Instrumental-comitative case
Intransitive case
Nominative case
Pegative case
Declension
Czech declension
English declension
German declension
Latin declension
Latvian declension
Slovak declension
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The nominative case is a grammatical case for a noun, which generally marks the subject of a verb, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments.

[edit] Explanation

The nominative case is the usual, natural form (more technically, the least marked) 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 nominative word is the base form or stem, with no inflection; 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; that is, it is the one used to cite a word, to list it as a dictionary entry, etc.

Nominative cases are found in Latin, Icelandic and Old English, among other languages. English still retains some nominative pronouns, as opposed to the accusative case or oblique case: 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 (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 languages, such as Latin, Greek, and most modern Western European languages. Some writers on English 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.

In active-stative languages there is a case sometimes called nominative which is the most marked case, and is used for the subject of a transitive verb or a voluntary subject of an intransitive verb, 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.

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