grammar In linguistics, grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rul ...

, an oblique (

abbreviated An abbreviation () is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method including shortening, contraction, initialism (which includes acronym), or crasis. An abbreviation may be a shortened form of a word, usually ended with a trailing per ...

; from ) or objective case (

abbr An abbreviation () is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method including shortening, contraction, initialism (which includes acronym), or crasis. An abbreviation may be a shortened form of a word, usually ended with a trailing perio ...

. ) is a nominal

case Case or CASE may refer to: Instances * Instantiation (disambiguation), a realization of a concept, theme, or design * Special case, an instance that differs in a certain way from others of the type Containers * Case (goods), a package of relate ...

other than the

nominative case In grammar, the nominative case ( abbreviated ), subjective case, straight case, or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb, or (in Latin and formal variants ...

and, sometimes, the

vocative In grammar, the vocative case (abbreviated ) is a grammatical case which is used for a noun that identifies a person (animal, object, etc.) being addressed or occasionally for the noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and numeral ...

. A noun or pronoun in the oblique case can generally appear in any role except as subject, for which the

is used. The term ''objective case'' is generally preferred by modern English grammarians, where it supplanted

Old English Old English ( or , or ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-S ...

dative In grammar, the dative case (abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob a drink". In this exampl ...

and

accusative In grammar, the accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to receive the direct object of a transitive verb. In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: "me", "him", "her", " ...

. When the two terms are contrasted, they differ in the ability of a word in the oblique case to function as a

possessive A possessive or ktetic form (Glossing abbreviation, abbreviated or ; from ; ) is a word or grammatical construction indicating a relationship of possession (linguistics), possession in a broad sense. This can include strict ownership, or a numbe ...

attributive; whether English has an oblique rather than an objective case then depends on how " proper" or widespread one considers the dialects where such usage is employed. An oblique case often contrasts with an

unmarked In linguistics and social sciences, markedness is the state of standing out as nontypical or divergent as opposed to regular or common. In a marked–unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one. The dominant defau ...

case, as in English oblique ''him'' and ''them'' versus nominative ''he'' and ''they''. However, the term ''oblique'' is also used for languages without a nominative case, such as ergative–absolutive languages; in the

Northwest Caucasian languages The Northwest Caucasian languages, also called West Caucasian, Abkhazo-Adyghean, Abkhazo-Circassian, Circassic, or sometimes Pontic languages (from Ancient Greek, ''pontos'', referring to the Black Sea, in contrast to the Northeast Caucasian ...

, for example, the oblique-case marker serves to mark the ergative, dative, and applicative case roles, contrasting with the

absolutive case In grammar, the absolutive case ( abbreviated ) is the case of nouns in ergative–absolutive languages that would generally be the subjects of intransitive verbs or the objects of transitive verbs in the translational equivalents of nominativ ...

, which is unmarked.

Hindustani

Hindustani (

Hindi Modern Standard Hindi (, ), commonly referred to as Hindi, is the Standard language, standardised variety of the Hindustani language written in the Devanagari script. It is an official language of India, official language of the Government ...

and

Urdu Urdu (; , , ) is an Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the Languages of Pakistan, national language and ''lingua franca'' of Pakistan. In India, it is an Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of Indi ...

)

noun In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, like living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an Object (grammar), object or Subject (grammar), subject within a p ...

pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (Interlinear gloss, glossed ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the part of speech, parts of speech, but so ...

s and postpositions decline for an oblique case which exclusively serves to mark the grammatical case roles using the case-marking postpositions. The oblique case has similarities with the

vocative case In grammar, the vocative case (abbreviated ) is a grammatical case which is used for a noun that identifies a person (animal, object, etc.) being addressed or occasionally for the noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and numeral ...

in Hindustani. Some examples of the declension pattern are shown in the tables below:

Bulgarian

Bulgarian, an analytic

Slavic language The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the Ear ...

, also has an oblique case form for

s: Dative role: * "Give that ball ''to me''" дай тaзи топка на мен (''day tazi topka na men'') (This oblique case is a relic of the original, more complex

proto-Slavic Proto-Slavic (abbreviated PSl., PS.; also called Common Slavic or Common Slavonic) is the unattested, reconstructed proto-language of all Slavic languages. It represents Slavic speech approximately from the 2nd millennium BC through the 6th ...

system of noun cases, and there are remnants of other cases in Bulgarian, such as the

of direct address)

English

An objective case is marked on the

English personal pronouns The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to grammatical number, number, grammatical person, person, grammatical case, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of n ...

and as such serves the role of the accusative and dative cases that other Indo-European languages employ. These forms are often called

object pronoun In linguistics, an object pronoun is a personal pronoun that is used typically as a grammatical object: the direct or indirect object of a verb, or the object of a preposition. Object pronouns contrast with subject pronouns. Object pronouns in En ...

s. They serve a variety of grammatical functions which they would not in languages that differentiate the two. An example using first person singular objective pronoun ''me'': *in an

role for a direct object (including double object and

oblique Oblique may refer to: * an alternative name for the character usually called a slash (punctuation) ( / ) *Oblique angle, in geometry * Oblique triangle, in geometry * Oblique lattice, in geometry * Oblique leaf base, a characteristic shape of the ...

ditransitives): ::''Do you see me?'' ::''The army sent me to Korea.'' *in a

role for an indirect object: ::''Kim passed the pancakes to me.'' ::''Kim passed me the pancakes.'' *as the object of a preposition ( except in possessives): ::''That picture of me was blurry.'' ::(cf. double genitive as in ''That picture of mine was stolen.'') *in copular

deixis In linguistics, deixis () is the use of words or phrases to refer to a particular time (e.g. ''then''), place (e.g. ''here''), or person (e.g. ''you'') relative to the Context (language use), context of the utterance. Deixis exists in all known na ...

: :: eferring to a photograph''This is me on the beach.'' *in existentials (sometimes, but not always, replaceable by the nominative—in very formal style): ::''It's me again.'' ::(''cf. Once again, it is I.'' ormal ::''Who is it?—It's me.'' ::(''cf. It is I '' 'to whom you are speaking'') ::It's me who should fix it.'' ::(''cf. Since I made it, it is I who should fix it.'') *in a nominative role with predicate or verbal

ellipsis The ellipsis (, plural ellipses; from , , ), rendered , alternatively described as suspension points/dots, points/periods of ellipsis, or ellipsis points, or colloquially, dot-dot-dot,. According to Toner it is difficult to establish when t ...

: ::''Who made this bicycle?—Me.'' ::(''cf. Who made this bicycle?—I did.'') ::''I like him.—Hey, me too.'' ::(''cf. I like him.—Hey, I do too.'') ::''Who's gonna clean up this mess?—Not me!'' *in coordinated nominals: ::''Me and him are going to the store.'' (only in colloquial speech) ::(''cf. Is he going? Yes, he and I are going.'') *as a disjunctive topic marker: ::''Me, I like French.'' The pronoun ''me'' is not

inflected In linguistic Morphology (linguistics), morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical category, grammatical categories such as grammatical tense, ...

differently in any of these uses; it is used for all grammatical relationships except the

genitive case In grammar, the genitive case ( abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive ca ...

of possession (in standard English) and a non-disjunctive

as the subject. *It may also be used as a comedic stylistic effect of blatant error ( nonstandard,

pidgin A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified form of contact language that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn f ...

, baby or foreigner talk or " broken English"): :: poken by Cookie Monster">Cookie_Monster.html" ;"title="poken by Cookie Monster">poken by Cookie Monster''Me so hungry.'' ::(''the above example also employs copula deletion to similar effect'')

French

Old French had a nominative case and an oblique case, called and respectively. In Modern French, the two cases have mostly merged and the ''cas régime'' has survived as the sole form for the majority of nouns. For example, the word "''conte'' (count, earl)": *Old French: **Nominative: li (singular), li (plural) **Oblique: le (singular), les (plural) *Modern French: ** le (singular), les (plural) In some cases, both the ''cas sujet'' and ''cas régime'' of one noun have survived but produced two nouns in Modern French with different meanings. For example, today's means "friend" and means "companion", but in Old French these were different declensions of the same noun.

Kurdish

Kurdish has an oblique for pronouns, objects, and for objects of izafe constructs.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Oblique Case Grammatical cases

Hindustani

Bulgarian

English

French

Kurdish

See also

See also

See also

References