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German accusative? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Matthew12 Newbie United States Joined 4326 days ago 13 posts - 20 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, German | Message 1 of 22 01 May 2013 at 3:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Well actually, I don't even know how to identify the direct object in English! In this sentence, "The man became upset when you arrived," I understand that "the man" is the subject, so I assumed that "you" would be the direct object. Doesn't the direct object answer the questions whom or what? "Gina's boyfriend gave her a beautiful diamond ring." Gina's boyfriend is the subject, diamond ring is the direct object, and "her" is the indirect object? Right? So as you can see I'm not even close to understanding it in German. If you know any good ways for learning the German accusative, I'm open to all options. If there are any particularly good websites out there, please let me know! I can identify the direct object in short sentences like, "I eat food" but when it gets to complex sentences I get lost. Vielen dank!
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| Matthew12 Newbie United States Joined 4326 days ago 13 posts - 20 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, German | Message 2 of 22 01 May 2013 at 3:54am | IP Logged | ||
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And in this sentence: "Blanca forgot her books in her car." If Blanca is the subject, and "her books" is the direct object,then what is "her car"??? Or should it be "Er ist der Lehrer" or "Er ist den Lehrer"?
Edited by Matthew12 on 01 May 2013 at 3:57am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5600 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes  | Message 3 of 22 01 May 2013 at 4:04am | IP Logged | ||
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In the sentence "The man became upset when you arrived", "you" is subject too, because "when" begins a sub-clause. You do not ask: *Whom arrived?, but who arrived? You can test it by swapping the pronoun: It is "The man became upset when I arrived,", not *"The man became upset when me arrived,"
A direct object is never preceeded by a preposition, so "in her car" gives only the location. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5961 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 4 of 22 01 May 2013 at 4:26am | IP Logged | ||
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Think of the direct object as the person or thing who the verb directly acts on. Not
all sentences have a direct object. "The man became upset when you arrived" doesn't have one for example. "When" starts a new clause whose subject is "you". "Gina's boyfriend gave her a beautiful diamond ring." The direct object of this sentence is "a beautiful diamond ring" because the verb acts directly on it. "her" is the indirect object, which is expressed through the dative in German. In German, "Ginas Freund hat ihr einen schönen Diamantring gegeben." "Blanca forgot her books in her car." I don't know what the grammatical term for "her car" would be, but it is expressed through the dative in German because it's describing where something is. In German, "Blanca hat ihre Bücher im Auto vergessen." "Er ist der Lehrer" is correct. The verb "sein" and all of its variations don't require you to use accusative. Don't worry too much about completely understanding it right now. It becomes quite clear through prolonged exposure to German. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| LanguageSponge Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5767 days ago 1197 posts - 1487 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Slovenian, Greek, Italian | Message 5 of 22 01 May 2013 at 8:28am | IP Logged | ||
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I had trouble with this when I learnt German too, and I imagine it's a common problem for everyone. I think the accusative is one of the hardest concepts of the case system to get right.
Firstly, it would be easier to understand this use of the accusative case in English using the words "he" and "she", which are subjects, and their object (accusative) equivalents which are "him" and "her" - because they *change*, whereas "you" doesn't. The reason you're finding the accusative difficult to understand here, I think, is because "you" is the same as both a subject *and* an object. Most other subject pronouns (I, he, her, we, they) change when they're objects - "me, him, her, us, them". Look at the following sentences: My brother loves Jenny. He (my brother) loves her (Jenny). We hate our English teacher. We hate him. Just because a word doesn't change, doesn't mean that it isn't playing a different grammatical role. For example: You like Jenny. In the above sentence, "you" is the subject. You are performing the "liking". Jenny is the object - "You like *her*". Jenny likes you. In this sentence, "you" doesn't change. But here, it's an object. How do we know that? Replace "you" with "he" or "she" and see if this makes sense - "Jenny likes he" - it doesn't make sense now, does it? So there's your answer. Here, "you" is the direct object. Important note: This works in 95% of instances where you'd expect an object/the accusative case, but there *are* differences between English and German grammar, as pointed out by lichtrausch above. One of the most common, which confused the hell out of me when I was learning because I thought I'd understood the above correctly, was "sein". In English we say "that is her" - "her" is a direct object in English. But this doesn't make sense in German. You just have to remember that "sein", the equivalent of "to be", always takes the nominative in German. That's the teacher. That's him. Das ist der Lehrer. Das ist er. Hope this serves to clear things up somewhat. Good luck! Jack Edited by LanguageSponge on 01 May 2013 at 9:23am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 22 01 May 2013 at 11:02am | IP Logged | ||
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Matthew12's problems show what happens when you only learn languages through input and absorption without grammar studies. But even a course in grammar won't automatically help you because the rules and paradigms in grammar are the result not only of observations of hard facts like endings, but also of 'softer' semantical observations .. like: what happens if we change the word order. The effect is so to say measured on a semantic scale. But even the presumed hard facts are anything but hard. They are based on genuine examples found for instance in literature OR constructed for the purpose by a native speaker - and in both cases it is only the gut feelings of the author that guarantees that a certain formulation is grammatically correct.
Let's take the copula verb(s) first. Actually English is lucky just to have one (to be) - Irish has got two, one for claiming a quality of something, the other to point out which one it is. It is commonly accepted that the copula has a subject, although in many languages this is can be implicit: "[io] sono Danese" ("I'm Danish" in Italian). The subject can also be a mere place holder with a reference to something which follows later or is known already: "it is obvious that this is a sentence" ---> "[that this is a sentence] is obvious". Languagesponge writes that "In English we say "that is her" - "her" is a direct object in English.". Actually you could claim that, but only because you don't have 'true' direct objects with copula verbs - and of course because the only accusatives in English are those of the personal pronouns, where "it's me" is far more common than "it is I". But almost all grammars for other languages (even those written in English) would state that the 'number two thing' attached to a copula verb is a subject predicative (except those influenced by Chomsky, because in his school the subject is a NP and the rest is a VP - verbal predicate - which includes the verb itself). In most languages with cases the subject predicative is in the nominative case like the subject - although often with the accusative if it's a personal pronoun. However there are exceptions. For instance in Russian, where there is an ongoing fight between the nominative and the instrumentative case. So even though you don't have to differentiate between subject predicatives with "to be" and direct objects with other verbs in English you do have to make the distinction in other languages - and inevitably that spills over into English, where you actually could defend that there is a direct object with the copula verb, as done by Languagesponge. The argument against doing this is that this function in the sentence just as well could be filled out by an adjective, and that's rare with other kinds of verbs than copula verbs - the exceptions are contrived things like "he likes to play hard to get", which do have a copula-like ring to them without having a true copula verb. So for this reason I stick with the distinction between direct objects and predicatives. Something similar can be said about certain constructions with a direct object and one more element, which could be called an 'object predicative': "I call him a fool". Here "him" is the direct object, and the person referred to is "a fool" (compare "he is a fool"). This is a different situation from the one with an indirect object: "I gave the pope a lollipop". The item given is not the same thing as the man or a characteristic property of the man. So what is the direct object here? One test is to put the sentence in the passive because direct objects then supposedly become subjects (at least in English). The trouble is that also indirect objects can become subjects through such a transformation: "a lollipop is given to the pope" or "the pope is given a lollipop". So in the absence of case markers you have to resort to your semantically based gut feeling (or the sneaky little "to", which shows that we don't want an obvious misunderstanding to occur). In this case the thing which is given is a sweet, and the receiver is a living person - not the inverse. So the lollipop must be the direct object of the original phrase, and the pope is the indirect object. So verbs may have a direct object and sometimes an indirect object, or they a combined with preposition clauses wich can be more or less standardized. Or they can stand alone. For the grammarian the general rule would be be to call the thing attached to the verb a direct object if it is a substantive with some attachments or a personal pronoun, and if there are two then the second one could be called an indirect object. This neat system is upheld by languages like Latin, where direct objects are in the accusative and indirect ones are in the dative case. But in most languages with cases there are verbs which 'take' other cases - like the German "freut euch des Lebens" (enjoy youplural the's life's), where "des Lebens" is in the genitive. And in Russian you can have verbs that commonly take complements in just about any case. But outside the simple direct objects you find the murky waters of adverb(ial)s. Actually the are specific word or word forms which always act as adverbials (NB: 'adverbial' is a role, and 'adverb' is a specific word which takes on that role). But in some cases there is a gray zone, as for instance with expressions of measure and time and price or manner. What is "a ton" in "The car weighs a ton"? Well, you could say "the car weighs a lot" or "the car weighs too much", and the general consensus is to regard the final element in such expressions as adverbials. But in "The man weighs the car" the car is without a doubt the direct object so fundamentally the problem is that the verb "to weigh" can behave in two very different ways: it can function as an intransitive verb with an adverbial or as a transitive verb with a direct object. You need extra arguments to claim that one is an adverbial and the other is a direct object. And where do you find those arguments? Either in the use of different cases OR in semantic considerations. Matthew12 apparently has one more problem, namely to distinguish a subordinate phrase inside a main phrase. Basically phrases are organized as boxes: you can have a box inside another box, which can be inside a third and much larger box. In those cases where the innermost box has a verbal of its own it will be the verb at this level that decides the roles of the elements that are attached to it, not the verb which is functioning as the verbal of the outer box. But sometimes the innermost box hasn't got a finite verb, but for instance a participle or an infinitive. And even infinite verbal forms can have other elements attached to them. For instance "to buy a house is very expensive". The outermost verb is "is" (a copula verb), and "very expensive" is the subject predicative (cr. the discussion above). The subject is "to buy a house", which has an inner structure where "a house" is the direct object of "to buy". When you build a grammatical description of a language you try to find recurring patterns, and you are most at ease if there is some clear indicator which divides all your examples into two or more nice heaps in such a way that members of one heap also in other respects clearly are different from all the members in other heaps. Unfortunately reality isn't always like that. Languages are basically chaotic phenomena where some kind of order imposes itself, but leaves areas where you have to draw arbitrary division lines or face descriptions which are too complicated to be useful. OK ... maybe this also became a bit complicated. Edited by Iversen on 01 May 2013 at 1:08pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4534 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 7 of 22 01 May 2013 at 12:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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I wouldn't stress too much about this. My wife, who's German, doesn't know what a direct object is either. :)
I'd really recommend buying a basic grammar, which would explain case and other things simply. I use "Essential German Grammar" by Stern and Bleiler (1961), which costs less than $10 on Amazon, which I highly recommend. To borrow from them: If you have a sentence like "The person paid the waiter", you have three basic ideas "the person", the "payment" and "the waiter". The job of grammar is to show how these three ideas are related. It turns out there are only three ways this can be done: (1) fixed word order (as in English) - so 'the cat sat on the mat' means something different from 'the mat sat on the cat'; (2) additional words can be added; or (3) the words themselves can be changed, which when this happens for nouns, pronouns and adjectives is called case (as is the situation in German). German has four cases - nominative, accusative, dative and genitive - though others are logically possible. For instance, there used to be a case that would indicate that an object belonged to the King (e.g., "golden crown" in the sentence 'the King's golden crown was beautiful'). English retains the accusative weakly. So the accusative form of 'I' is 'me', likewise 'he' --> 'him', 'she' --> 'her', 'they' --> 'them'. Also 'who' --> 'whom'. So 'he gives her the book' is 'he (nomative) gives her (accusative) the book (dative)', which is written differently in English from 'she gives him the book'. The names of the cases can be a bit confusing, and if it helps just think of them as 'case A', 'case B', 'case C' and 'case D'. There are just systematic rules about what changes should be made depending on the case, and what case you apply depends on a few rules. The accusative is used in the following situations (similar rules can be written down for the other three cases): 1. For the direct object. The 'direct object' is simply the thing the verb is acting on directly. So in 'I wrote a letter to someone', 'letter' is the direct object, which remains true if you mix up the word order a bit 'To someone I wrote a letter' or 'I wrote to someone a letter' - in all cases the writing is being done to the letter, not to the 'someone' (note: the 'to' in these examples indicates the indirect (dative) part of the sentence). [But note: Rule 1 is broken for certain verbs, which always take either the nomative or dative case, and for certain prepositions that always take the dative - see below.] 2. Words following prepositions either take the accusative, dative or genitive (which is great because if you know the case associated with a preposition you don't need to worry about direct object etc): 2a. Certain prepositions ALWAYS take the accusative (e.g., bis, um, durch, wider etc). 'Wir fahren durch die Stadt', where 'durch die Stadt' is always accusative. [Note: likewise certain prepositions always take the dative (e.g., mit, seit, aus, nach etc). So 'Ich gehe mit dir' NOT 'Ich gehe mit dich' AND other prepositions always take the genitive (e.g., trotz, statt, wegen etc)] 2b. Certain other prepositions sometimes take the accusative when movement is involved, and the dative when there isn't movement (i.e., an, auf, neben, in, vor etc). So 'Wir gehen vor das Rathaus' ('vor das Rathaus' because movement is involved), but 'Wir stehen vor dem Rathaus' (vor dem Rathaus' because there is no movement, we are just standing there). You just need to learn which prepositions go with which case. 3. While in most situations the direct object is accusative, some verbs ALWAYS take the nominative case (e.g., sein - to be, blieben - to remain, scheinen - to seem, werden - to become). So "I am I" not "I am me" or "Ich bin Ich", or "Du bleibst du", NOT "Ich bin mich", and "Du bleibst dich". Likewise there are other verbs that ALWAYS take the dative (e.g., glauben, danken, helfen, etc). So 'Ich helfe dir" not "Ich helfe dich". You just have to learn which verbs take the nomative and dative over time. Think of the default being accusative, but with a few nomative verbs, and quite a few more dative ones. There isn't necessarily a lot of logic here. You just have to learn as brute facts what verbs and prepositions go with which cases. Anki can be quite useful here. It will also become much clearer once you've seen lots of examples. Edited by patrickwilken on 01 May 2013 at 2:25pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 22 01 May 2013 at 12:51pm | IP Logged | ||
She doesn't need to. She's German and knows where to use the accusative. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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