Talk:Dative/Accusative

Article Created
I have created this article to eliminate existing and potential clarity regarding (mostly in English) situations in which languages have morphologically identical dative and accusative cases. There are pages here on WP (and references throughout the internet) in which such situations are referred to as a single unique objective case and also where these are grouped as oblique case which is in fact a case but not one that is used in languages like English (the most commonly discussed language that conflates dative and accusative forms). The term objective case is rooted not in linguistics or language studies but rather as a promoted concept of English grammar guide publishers having originally been coupled with subjective and possessive as case names to be used for describing English grammar but with no regard to matching up case descriptions in their treatment of English with those same cases in other languages or in language in general. Outside of the few remaining North American K-12 education centered grammar and usage guides still using this system, subjective and possessive have fallen from use (once again replaced with the original nominative and genitive names) with objective still showing up but always referring to this conflation of dative and accusative. Only in situations in which lack of case (and case function) understanding is evident is objective actually purported to be an actual case. Because there is so much room for confusion and because using a nearly language-specific term such as objective falls outside of the accepted practices of the field, linguists and modern grammarians refer to such usage as Dative/Accusative (retaining the inference to two separate yet alike cases) instead of objective or in some cases simply list the dative and accusative cases separately but with redundant forms.

The articles here on Wikipedia and the need for those unfamiliar with this conflation to look up or reference these single forms justify using a single term dative/accusative versus insisting on the use of both dative and accusative separately in describing the various pronouns and such, but it should be clear (which I feel this article is) that the one form is still two cases rather than a single mystery case as is implied by objective.Drew.ward (talk) 17:21, 18 March 2012 (UTC)


 * The proper term for this is oblique case. Per Crystal's dict.,
 * oblique (adj.) (obl, OBL) In languages which express grammatical relationships by means of inflections, this term refers to the form taken by a noun phrase (often a single noun or pronoun) when it refers collectively to all the case forms of a word except that of the unmarked case, or nominative.
 * You say, "with the differences between the two being most discernible at the syntactic and semantic level." But cases are distinguished on the morphological level. — kwami (talk) 19:05, 18 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Well cases can very well be syntactically defined and have no morphological marking.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 03:07, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
 * In the traditional use of the word, there is no syntactic case. Even in GB "Case theory", you need to capitalize "Case"; l.c. "case" is still morphologically defined. Though it's not uncommon for people to get sloppy and call syntactic case roles "case", just as it's common to call aspect "tense", I think that's s.t. we'd want to avoid in an encyclopedia. — kwami (talk) 06:59, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
 * You're basically right that this use of case conflates case with syntactic roles, and probably should be avoided.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 17:53, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
 * You cannot justify editing things on WP based on a single author's views when the general consensus of linguists in general supports something else. I believe you yourself stated something similar regarding an article I'd recently submitted that had only a single cited reference.  Case may be expressed in many ways with morphology being one, syntax being another, and so on.  The same goes for mood, aspect, polarity, interrogation, and probably every other grammatical category.  In languages such as English, case is generally expressed via word order with pronouns retaining the only remaining morphological remnant of lexically inflected case.Drew.ward (talk) 02:59, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
 * If there is a general view among linguists then you should be able to cite a source in favor of your view and use that to remove the tag. The solution is not to remove the tag "based on personal opinion". BAsically the entire article is dubious untill there are references to support it.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 03:04, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Actually, I meant that I was removing the tag because I feel the placement of that tag in the first place was based not on the validity of the article but rather on the personal opinion (regarding this topic versus the view they're pushing) of the person placing the tag originally. Googling Dative/Accusative + English yields pages of results and clicking just on the first five or six that pop up all list English as having a dative and accusative case but with merged forms (with one being a dictionary definition of that form although calling it accusative-dative and calling it a case) and not a single one claiming English has an 'oblique case'.  The only reason I wrote this article is because articles were being changed by one person to claim that English has an oblique case with others wanting it to read 'objective case', neither of which are correct and the fact that those things don't come up readily in google without specifically looking for them shows that those views are not normal.  This is a case of the person calling something dubious is himself pushing the dubious view whereas the one being targeted is the normal established one.Drew.ward (talk) 04:02, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
 * What's dubious is that you're claiming English has two cases, DAT and ACC, which happen to look the same, as opposed to OBL, which is a single case that looks the same. Give me a source that English "me" is actually the form of two cases, and not just used for the syntactic roles that are covered by two cases in some other language, and that this is somehow different from a language with a single oblique case that is used for those same functions. — kwami (talk) 06:59, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
 * OK sure, we'll go back to third grade grammar... 'John gave me the book.' (me = indirect object which is dative case) 'John hit me.' (me = direct object which is accusative case).Drew.ward (talk) 07:27, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Again, you're confusing morphological case with syntactic case roles (or whichever term you prefer); dative is dative even in subject role (methinks), genitive is genitive even after a preposition (prepositions may govern ACC, DAT, GEN, INSTR in language which have them), etc.
 * As usual, it's you who are confusing things. You do this constantly.  You take it upon yourself to edit articles and change them from something standard to some very narrow view that you've gotten from somewhere.  Then you act like you've got the one and only view and tell whomever is arguing against you that they're confused.  Then, those same talk pages or the general linguistic pages will show you popping up a year or two later asking very general questions which either demonstrate or in which you admit not knowing very much about the topic (often expressing that you need to learn about something AFTER you've decided to either write an article about it or edit one)Drew.ward (talk) 07:50, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
 * 'dative is dative even in subject role (methinks)' No, it's not because the Dative case cannot occur in Subject position because subjects are handled by the nominative case. You're basing your arguments on trying redefine case from a grammatical category into a morphological characteristic only.  This is counter to the explanation of case here on wikipedia.  Consider this from the (trusted) SIL Glossary: "Case is a grammatical category determined by the syntactic or semantic function of a noun or pronoun.".   Further, grammatical category is defined as "A grammatical category is a set of syntactic features that express meanings from the same conceptual domain, occur in contrast to each other, and, are typically expressed in the same fashion."  Note as well that both 'objective' and 'oblique' are missing from their list of kinds of cases "kinds of cases: abessive, ablative, absolutive, accusative, allative, benefactive, causative, comitative, dative, delative, elative, equative, ergative, essive, genitive, illative, inessive, instrumental, lative, locative, nominative, partitive, prolative, superessive, translative, vocative."  I'm sure their listing is not meant to be exhaustive, but the fact that they've mentioned neither of the two case names in contention here certainly seems odd if they're as common and accepted as is being purported here.  Note that SIL's entry for Nominative case follows "Nominative case is the case that identifies clause subjects in nominative-accusative languages." Further, "Accusative case is the case in nominative-accusative languages that marks certain syntactic functions, usually direct objects." and "Dative case is a case that marks any of the following: Indirect objects; Nouns having the role of recipient (as of things given), beneficiary of an action, or possessor of an item."  English is a nominative-accusative language.  SIL's page on ergative case states this "Ergative case is the case of nouns in ergative-absolutive languages that would generally be the subjects of transitive verbs in the translation equivalents of nominative-accusative languages such as English." also pointing out that 'ergative' is an incorrect assignment to English as well which some edits on the English grammar page have pushed.  Wikidedia's own listing of nominative-accusative languages include English.  The WP articles on declension, dative, accusative, and many many more all treat case as a grammatical category and all include both dative and accusative case for English.  This push for objective and oblique is not reflective of linguistic consensus, wikipedia consensus, nor is it even in line with the rest of wikipedia (except the articles you've already changed.Drew.ward (talk) 16:23, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Of course the dative case can be used in subject role. See dative subject. As for the remainder of your comments, read the article on grammatical case so that you know what case is before you argue about it. — kwami (talk) 16:35, 22 March 2012 (UTC)


 * We should probably also keep this discussion in one place, so we don't repeat ourselves. — kwami (talk) 07:39, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
 * It's only in more than one place because you have assigned two separate tags requiring two discussions -- the dubious one here, and merge tag over at oblique case to which you seem intent on pushing over other views. If you think this is dubious then why not express from the get go why you think it's dubious instead of just tagging it as such.  And you know full well that you should not be proposing a merger of an article that is in contention until that contention is resolved, especially when you're one of the people pushing one viewpoint or another.Drew.ward (talk) 07:50, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I googled "Dative/Accusative" on google scholar and got no hits. You could solve this issue very quickly by providing some sources. There's no rule for when one may or may not propose a merger.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 13:15, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I found one instance: " ... the dat-acc. is used as object of a verb, as indirect object, as object of a preposition or as subject of an infinitive." (A.G. Kennedy, 1915. The pronoun of address in English literature of the thirteenth century, p. 67). But it's clearly maintaining that it's a unitary case, inheriting the roles of the old dative and accusative, and therefore only a difference in name. — kwami (talk) 16:51, 22 March 2012 (UTC)


 * You are both arguing the wron way about this. You are both saying what is and what isn't the right way to look at case. That's irrelevant - you should be saying who looks at case in which way and back up your statements with literature. It is not the case that there is a sole way to understand the meaning of case - there are many depenging on which theory of grammar is used. Any claim about what case is or isn't should be qualified with reference to specific theories and publications. And no, the SIL website is not an adequate source. ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 18:21, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Quotes of usage are at Talk:Oblique case. — kwami (talk) 18:41, 22 March 2012 (UTC)