Adjective

accusative (not comparable)

1. Producing accusations; accusatory; accusatorial; a manner that reflects a finding of fault or blame

   • This hath been a very accusative age — Sir E. Dering

2. (grammar): Applied to the case (as the fourth case of Latin and Greek nouns) which expresses the immediate object on which the action or influence of a transitive verb has its limited influence. Other parts of speech, including secondary or predicate direct objects, will also influence a sentence’s construction. In German the case used for direct objects.

Noun

accusative (plural accusatives)

1. (grammar): The accusative case.

The accusative case (abbreviated acc) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of (some or all) prepositions. It is a noun that is having something done to it, usually joined (such as in Latin) with the nominative case.

The English name "accusative" comes from the Latin accusativus, which, in turn, is a translation of the Greek αιτιατική. This word may also mean "causative", and this may have been the Greeks' intention in this name, but the sense of the Roman translation stuck and it is used in some other modern languages as the name of this case, for example in Russian (винительный).

The accusative case exists (or existed once) in all the Indo-European languages (including Latin, Sanskrit, Greek, German, Polish, Russian), in the Finno-Ugric languages, and in Semitic languages (such as Arabic). Balto-Finnic languages, such as Finnish and Estonian, have two cases to mark objects, the accusative and the partitive case. In morphosyntactic alignment terms, both perform the accusative function, but the accusative object is telic, while the partitive is not.

Modern English, which almost entirely lacks declension in its nouns, does not have an explicitly marked accusative case even in the pronouns. Such forms as whom, them, and her derive rather from the old Germanic dative forms, of which the -m and -r endings are characteristic. These words can arguably be classified in the oblique case instead. Most modern English grammarians feel that due to the lack of declension, except in a few pronouns where accusative and dative have been merged, that making case distinctions in English is no longer relevant, and frequently employ the term "objective case" instead (see Declension in English). Hine, a true accusative masculine third person singular pronoun, is attested in some northern English dialects as late as the 19th century.