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Russian case question | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4672 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 15 02 August 2013 at 8:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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In sentences like:
Иван даёт цветы Анне. Is it correct to say that цветы is in the Accusative case (which just happens to the same as the Nominative case here), or do we just say it's in the Nominative? I ask this question because I sometimes catch myself thinking things like "female singular adjectives in the dative are just prepositional...". I even catch text books talking along these lines sometimes. So I wonder what the correct way of talking about cases are when they are the same as other cases. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4845 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 2 of 15 02 August 2013 at 9:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The main criterion is the role the word plays in the sentence. In "Иван даёт цветы Анне", цветы is the direct object and thus in the accusative case. This becomes clear when we exchange цветы for сумка: "Иван даёт сумку Анне". Сумка has the accusative ending -у, which makes clear to us that давать takes an accusative object (and also a dative object: Анне).
In the same sentence, Иван is in the nominative case, because he is the subject. If цветы were in the nominative case, too, they would also be the subject, which is impossible. A verb cannot have two different subjects that are not connected by и. If you want to determine which case a noun is in and its ending is ambivalent, you have to check for its function in the sentence. If we only have the word цветы, we cannot tell if it's nominative or accusative. This becomes only clear when we examine the whole sentence. I don't quite understand what you mean by "female singular adjectives in the dative are just prepositional". They have the same ending, yes, but they play a different role in a sentence. This becomes absolutely clear if we take a look at masculine or neuter adjectives under similar conditions. The differences between subject, direct and indirect object may be hard to tell apart in the beginning, but they become clearer if you consciously try to analyze sentences. Students of Latin often parse sentences in order to determine subjects and objects. Maybe this could help you getting used to the concept of case. Edited by Josquin on 02 August 2013 at 9:11pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 3 of 15 02 August 2013 at 9:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, it is correct to say that's in the accusative. Obviously it'd be clearer if the noun were feminine singular since forms in singular for nominative and accusative singular are distinct.
I think that there's a fine line between saying the endings are the same and that cases are the same. In my experience it is common in those Slavonic languages with cases to enforce a difference between dative and locative/"prepositional" despite the merging of the cases' endings for at least feminine singular (in BCMS/SC, the merging is even stronger with dative and locative singular endings for almost all nouns being identical both phonologically and visually, and the plural endings for dative, locative and instrumental are identical despite the teaching practice of labelling these as distinct cases. Perhaps it's a holdover from Greco-Latin pedagogy or comparative Slavonic linguistics where the distinctiveness between these cases is more apparent). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4669 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 4 of 15 02 August 2013 at 10:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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In Croatian, the written forms may be the same, but the pronunciation is different (since the pitch accent is different). Sometimes the forms are different in writing too: KOMU? (to whom) dative; O KOME/KOM? (about whom) locative . Edited by Medulin on 02 August 2013 at 10:59pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4672 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes Speaks: English* | Message 5 of 15 02 August 2013 at 10:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks. It would be nice if a native speaker would chime in on this too. I have, on more than one occasion, read in a
text that plural accusative is just nominative or genitive, for example. I mean they say "is" instead of "has the same endings as". I often see charts with a big "G", "N" or "P" in a box, rather than written out endings. I just want to make sure I'm talking about it correctly when I talk to natives, teachers, etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4845 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 6 of 15 02 August 2013 at 11:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Accusative being the same as nominative or genitive refers only to the form of the word. However, it does not refer to the function of the case. Russian does have an accusative case which can a) have its own ending (fem. sg. in -у/-ю), b) have the same form as the nominative (neut. sg. and pl., masc. inanimate sg. and pl., fem. sg. in -ь and inanimate pl.) or c) have the same ending as the genitive (masc. animate sg. and pl., fem. animate pl.).
However, having the same ending doesn't mean the accusative case is the same case as nominative or genitive, because that doesn't make any sense from a grammatical point of view! When we establish a grammatical rule, we have to look at all instances. It would be very weird to say a verb can take a nominative object (if such a thing existed), a genitive object, or an accusative object depending on the gender and animacy of the noun. No, we say it takes an accusative object and the accusative forms of some nouns happen to be the same as their genitive or nominative forms. Those boxes saying A=N/G or G/D/P are there for convenience and in order to save space. They do not mean accusative and nominative/genitive are the same case. A case is determined by its function and not by its endings. Those tables offer an overview over case endings, not functions! Of course, it would be nice if a native Russian speaker could verify my point of view, but I have studied enough inflected Indo-European languages to know what I'm talking about (apart from the fact that I am a native speaker of an inflected Indo-European language myself). And every Russian grammar book I have ever encountered says exactly the same: The forms are the same, not the cases. EDIT: Another example from German. The definite article is "der" for nom. sg. masc. as well as gen. and dat. sg. fem. On the other hand, it is "die" for nom. and acc. sg. fem. as well as nom. and acc. pl. (all genders). No one would conclude that gen. and dat. fem. are the same as nom. masc. The article serves absolutely different well-distinguishable functions which every native speaker instinctively perceives. It's just a coincidence in the forms of the article. Edited by Josquin on 02 August 2013 at 11:52pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 7 of 15 02 August 2013 at 11:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
My only comment about equating accusative with direct object is that I initially tried to learn the Finnish direct object using the same Indo-Europeanized template (some of my textbooks adhered to this model) but ran into trouble since the Indo-European template doesn't fully account for the considerations in Finnish (see here for related discussion and a study showing how teaching the Finnish direct object as if it were like the Western European accusative per functional considerations caused trouble for Dutch students). I indeed think of a nominative direct object as weird as that may sound because after my experience with Finnish and Estonian, I basically had to do so to get the endings right when expressing myself in those languages. Forgive the digression but here's how I've come to comfortably think of a synchronically nominative direct object. syödä "to eat", omena "apple" Syön omenaa. "I'm eating [part of a/the] apple", "I'll be eating an apple" [functionally accusative but synchronically it's the partitive singular ending] Olen syömässä omenaa "I'm eating a/the apple", "I'm eating part of an/the apple" [functionally accusative but synchronically it has the partitive singular ending] Syön omenan. "I'll eat up the apple" [functionally accusative, but synchronically it's the genitive singular ending, -n ] Syö omena! "Eat [up] a/the apple!" [functionally accusative, but synchronically it's the nominative singular form, i.e. no ending] I eventually found it easier to teach myself to think we have a direct object in Finnish and the ending attached depends on what is happening to the object (i.e. is it a complement of a negated action or not? is it a complement of an ongoing action, or not? is it a complement of an action which is by definition not instantaneous or of undefined duration?). Thinking of accusative being equal to direct object led me off into the weeds for too long when learning Finnish. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4845 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 8 of 15 03 August 2013 at 12:21am | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, thanks for your insight, Chung, but I think Finnish as a Finno-Ugric language plays in an entirely different league than Russian as an Indo-European language. Obviously, Finnish cases contain some information about the aspect of an action that Russian would convey by using verbal aspect. Equating IE with FU cases might be misleading, but this obviously doesn't apply to the Russian accusative.
I would be willing to say that the Russian accusative is a very weird case as it doesn't even have its own question (its either кто? or кого?, relying on nominative and genitive here as well), however: the fact that there are special accusative endings (-у/-ю) in the fem. sg. justify the claim that there is an accusative case in Russian. As I said: If we set up a grammatical rule, we have to check it for consistency. It would be possible to say there is no accusative in Russian, instead verbs take their direct objects either in the nominative case if they're inanimated and in the genitive if they're animated. BUT! This whole theory doesn't work out because of the accusative endings in the fem. sg. In order to create a consistent rule, we have to say the accusative case exists and its endings are the same as in the nominative or genitive for most nouns. For feminine adjectives, however, it's absolutely clear that only their forms are the same in the genitive, dative, instrumental, and prepositional as masculine and neuter adjectives have clearly distinguishable endings for all the mentioned cases. By the way, the instrumental ending used to be -ою/-ею, which was assimilated to -ой/-ей. It still exists in poetry and so on. Edited by Josquin on 03 August 2013 at 12:25am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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