Case: case
| Values: | Acc | Com | Dat | Nom |
A case is each of the different forms a nominal word can take to express a syntactic function in a sentence. Cases are characteristic (but not exclusive) of many Indo-European languages.
In Spanish, the closest equivalent that has been preserved is in the pronouns. In UD Spanish morphology, three cases are distinguished: Nominative, Dative and Accusative.
Nom: nominative
The Nominative case is used when the pronoun functions as the subject of the sentence, which is the person, place, or thing doing the action. Examples of this in Spanish are pronouns like “yo” (I), “tú” (you), and “nosotros” (we).
Examples:
- Yo voy a la biblioteca. “I go to the library.”
- Nosotros comemos siempre. “We always eat.”
Acc: accusative
The Accusative case is used for direct objects, which directly receive the action of the verb. In Spanish, the pronouns used in the accusative case are “me” (me), “te” (you), “lo” (him, it), and “la” (her, it), among others.
Examples:
- Yo lo veo. “I see it.”
- Mi hermana nos enseña. “My sister teaches us.”
Dat: dative
Dative case is used for indirect objects, which indirectly receive the action of the sentence. The Spanish pronouns for the dative case are “me” (me), “te” (you), “le” (him, her, it), and “nos” (us), among others.
Examples:
- Yo le doy el regalo. “I give him the present.”
- Mi hermana me escribe. “My sister writes me.”
Com: comitative
The comitative case is normally not morphological in Spanish and the corresponding meaning is expressed by the preposition con “with”. However, three pronouns fuse with the preposition and create a form that is different from other case forms of the pronoun and that can be described as comitative.
Examples
- conmigo “with me”
- contigo “with you”
- consigo “with himself/herself”
Acc,Nom: nominative or accusative
In UD Spanish treebanks, certain pronouns are annotated with the double case value Acc,Nom, which signifies that
these pronouns can function in both the Accusative (as direct objects) and Nominative (as subjects).
This group of pronouns includes “nosotros/nosotras” (we), “él/ella/ello” (he/she/it), and “ellos/ellas” (they). These
pronouns can be used as the subject of a sentence, but they can also receive the action of a verb directly, which would
typically be the function of an object. This dual function is why they are annotated with both the Nom and Acc case
values.
For example, consider the sentence Nosotros vemos a ellos. Here, nosotros is the subject of the sentence
(Nominative case), and ellos is the direct object (Accusative case). In this sentence, both “nosotros” and “ellos”
would be tagged with Case=Acc,Nom, indicating their potential to function in either case, depending on the sentence
structure.
References
- REAL ACADEMIA ESPAÑOLA (2009): Nueva gramática de la lengua española. Madrid: Espasa.
Case in other languages: [am] [apu] [arr] [bej] [bg] [cs] [el] [eme] [en] [es] [ess] [et] [fi] [ga] [gn] [grc] [gub] [hu] [hy] [ka] [kmr] [koi] [kpv] [ky] [mdf] [myu] [myv] [pcm] [pt] [qpm] [ru] [sl] [sv] [tl] [tpn] [tr] [tt] [u] [uk] [urb] [urj]