Case: case
Case is usually an inflectional feature of nouns and,
depending on language, other parts of speech (pronouns,
adjectives, determiners, numerals,
verbs) that mark agreement with nouns. In some tagsets
it is also valency feature of adpositions (saying that
the adposition requires its argument to be in that case).
Case helps specify the role of the noun phrase in the sentence, especially in free-word-order languages. For example, the nominative and accusative cases often distinguish subject and object of the verb, while in fixed-word-order languages these functions would be distinguished merely by the positions of the nouns in the sentence.
Since Portuguese is not a free-word-order language, case is used only to describe (pronouns that inherited this feature from Latin.
We have three cases in Portuguese: nominative (Nom), dative (Dat) and accusative (Acc).
Nom: nominative / direct
Examples
- eu, ele, você, tu, nós
Acc: accusative / oblique
Examples
- lo in visando dotá-lo de poderes “aiming to empower him”
- se in a copa que amanhã se disputa “the cup that will be played tomorrow”
Dat: dative
Examples
- lhe, lhes in políticas que lhes dizem respeito “policies that concern them”
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]