Case issues

[lynxypoo.livejournal.com]

Does anyone know where I might find something to practice recognizing differences in the nomnative, prepositional, and accusative case? (I'll be learning the instrumental case in the next chapter).

behind the cut are a coulple excerpts from my latest excercise, what I thought it was, and what it should be- I just ask why?

2) Here is a blackboard, and there is a map.
Вот доску, а вот карту

Вот доскa, а вот картa.
>>Why are blackboard and map not accusative?

9) Where is Anne, at home or in school?
Где Анна, дому или школе?

>>Где Анна, домa или в школе?
Is дома irregular or for some reason -not- feminine? in the vocab it lists дома as 'at home', but most words ending in -a are feminine, and thus, change to y, right?


спасибо!

Comments

[nur-ein-tier.livejournal.com]

дома is "at home," i think "home/house" (the actual building) is just дом.

[lynxypoo.livejournal.com]

aha... i suppose that can make sense. Thank you!

[insaint.livejournal.com]

That's correct.

[lexabear.livejournal.com]

2) They are not accusative because they are not receiving any action. You're simply pointing out the fact that they exist. In general, when things exist they're nominative.

9) "дома" is not a noun, but a special adverb that is not declined. It comes from the noun "дом" (house, building).

[svyatogor.livejournal.com]

Вот доскa, а вот картa.
>>Why are blackboard and map not accusative?

In russian we are skipping verb "быть". So, instead of "вот есть доска" we say just "вот доска". Now you see why it's in nominative.

[belacane.livejournal.com]

in number two, the nouns are not accusative, because nothing is happening to them.

nouns only become accusative if they are the direct object (i.e you are doing something to them)

example:

I eat food
food would be in accusative because you are eating it (i.e something is happening to it.

There's the food
Nothing is happening to the food, so it remains in nomative.

(note that if you say, there is no food, or behind the food....etc. then different cases are used, but I'm assuming you havn't gotten that far in yours lessons yet, so don't worry about it.)

good luck.
if you need any help feel free to ask.

[mangiami.livejournal.com]

In the first example, there isn't actually a verb operating, it's just "here blackboard, and here map." If you've ever looked at Latin, when you say puella est bona, you don't need bona in the accusative because it's just an attribute linked to the subject by a linking verb. In Russian present tense, you just omit the linking verb.

Дома is the just a special prepositional form meaning "at home." Expressing being at home and going home is a little irregular in Russian. You simply have to memorize. When you need prepositional, use Дома for "at home."

You only need accusative case when you need to express a direct object, and in this case, you don't really have a verb in the first case, and in the second one, you're only asking about location, not action.

I assume you know why you needed в школе and not just школе, then? I hope that helps.

[malaya-zemlya.livejournal.com]

>Why are blackboard and map not accusative?
Unlike English "is", its Russian equivalent "быть" (implied here) wants its complement in Nominative. In English you say [Nom] is [Acc], in Russian you say [Nom] есть [Nom] This is a fairly general pattern. Compare:

It's me, Mario vs. Это яthe captain himself - за штурвалом был сам капитан

Btw/ There is an alternative pattern in Russian where complement of "есть" takes the instrumental case. As far as I can tell it is used when the complement describes a property of the subject (as opposed to merely pointing to it) and it only works with past or future tenses (был, была, будет etc)

Степанов был жуликом - Stepanov was a con-man
Роман будет пожарником - Roman will be a firefighter

This is a fairly new usage, older books will still employ Nominative case here:

Деревня, где скучал Евгений, была прелестный уголок - The place where Eugene loathed his leisure was an enchanting country nook
(That's from "Eugene Onegin" by Alexander Pushkin)

[lexabear.livejournal.com]

A nitpick to what you said (I just don't want OP to be confused):

English does not use [Nom] is [Acc] - the [Nom] is [Nom] pattern still holds. Your example of Mario's "It's me!" is something that prescriptivists hate. Because "It's me" is the commonly-accepted way to answer the phone, etc, it can look like "[Nom] is [Acc]" is correct, when it really isn't in every situation. If you have sentences like "My neighbor is a penguin" the noun "penguin" is the predicate nominative.

It's a fairly academic difference and one that most native speakers don't completely understand.

[philena.livejournal.com]

Actually . . .

Yeah, I just want to pick a nit too. Every child when learning English tries to say "it's me" or "me and Joey went to the store" after he is old enough to form intuitively grammatical sentences when aspects of "good grammar" are not at issue. He knows not to say "me went to the store" and he knows not to say "Joey saw I", which means that he has a grasp of subjective and objective case in English.

Except in pronouns, which show nominative, accusitive, and debateably genitive case, practically every other noun in English except genitive (which is slightly under debate about its status as a case in English) does not change. (You can't tell what case "penguin" is in because "penguin" never shows case.) Only pronouns do, and they have only two and a half cases--subjective, objective, and maybe genitive. When a child knows that it's okay to say "I went" and not "me went" but he also thinks it's okay to say "me and Joey went" and "it's me", he's showing that he has an intuitive understanding that when pronouns are combined with something--anything, be it even another noun to form a complex subject--it goes into the objective case. Of course, this is not Standard English, which is why the kiddies are corrected, but then no one really speaks Standard English, and unless you are a secretary who must say this everyday, it will always sound odd to answer the phone with "It is I," or to say "he is faster than I." "I" is not supposed to go into the subjective case in these positions. It wants to be in the objective one, and forcing it into the subjective case simply perpetrates the confusion and allows horrible, ear-splitting hypercorrections like "Come talk to Joey or I."

As further evidence of the more robust nature of the expression "me and Joey," note how you can say either "me and Joey went to the store," or "Joey and me went to the store," and both will sound equally (un)grammatical. However, it sounds much more odd to say "I and Joey went to the store," suggesting that the use of "I" is odd in the grand scheme of things.

[philena.livejournal.com]

to conclude: Native speakers really do understand these distinctions, but prescriptivists who wanted a few hundred years ago to turn English into Latin confused the issue.

[oryx_and_crake]

"Joey and me went to the store" sounds very ungrammatical to me. I believe you, however, when you say that many native speakers would prefer it to the correct version. Many native speakers I know would also confuse "their", "there" and "they're", "you're" and "your" and even write things like "there are two dog's" and "someone say's". Strangely enough, most non-native speakers do not make these mistakes.

[philena.livejournal.com]

Yes, but that's orthographical (and very painful, I agree). The tendencies I referred to don't presuppose any degree of literacy.

[lexabear.livejournal.com]

There actually is a phase children go through when they do say things like "Me went" (though more often with "her" subjects than "me" or "him"). Granted, they grow out of it pretty quickly (most of the time, it disappears before 5 years old), whereas even adult speakers say "Me and Joey went."

Umm, I forgot what point I was trying to make, actually. I think I might have just wanted to put my ridiculously arcane knowledge of children's pronoun case errors to use.

[malaya-zemlya.livejournal.com]

I assumed the author was guided by the "[Nom] is [Acc]" pattern, because she used [Acc] in her examples.

: when it really isn't in every situation
Well, yes. If Her Majesty Elisabeth the Second were to ask who is that young man over there, I would answer "It is I"..In most other cases Nominative sounds a bit haughty. To me, at least :) A descriptive linguist would say "it is I" is the marked form, while "It's me" is unmarked.

As of "It is a penguin" , here you cannot really tell if it is Nom or Acc. A penguin is a penguin either way. In suspect that internally English speakers consider Accusative case == Object. Life is simpler that way.

[lexabear.livejournal.com]

I had tried to word it so carefully so as not to put myself in the prescriptivist camp...

I do agree that "It is I" is haughty/stilted sounding. But it is the "correct" form - I'm not saying it's what people actually use, nor saying they should, nor that "[Nom] is [Acc]" is a concept foreign to English. But saying that English uses "[Nom] is [Acc]" instead of "[Nom] is [Nom]" is misleading, because in situations other than pronouns there's no marked difference. I would still hold that there's a conceptual difference, though that may have simply been instilled in me through interminable sentence diagramming excercizes in middle school.

[malaya-zemlya.livejournal.com]

:I would still hold that there's a conceptual difference

Being a non-native speaker I can only guess at your intuition. Out of curiosity, are you talking about one of these by any chance :

a)"In reality, Dr. Jekyll was Mr. Hyde" vs. "Dr. Jekyll was a crazy scientist" (i.e. an identity vs. a property)
b)"Clark Kent is an alien from the planet Krypton" vs "Clark Kent is a reporter" (i.e. an essential quality vs. a role)

Or are you thinking of something else?

I have to agree that the question about the true case of the word "a penguin" in the sentence "my neighbour is a penguin" is a bit like counting angels on a head of a pin. English language just doesn't use case system much.

[lexabear.livejournal.com]

Not identity vs. property, but one of "Blank is blank" vs. "Blank transitive-verbed blank." A difference of distinctly accusative/objective case (in the latter) vs. arguable (technically nom but informally acc/obj for pronouns, technically nominative but unprovable for other nouns).

[malaya-zemlya.livejournal.com]

:technically nom but informally acc/obj for pronouns, technically nominative but unprovable for other nouns

This doesn't sound right. Case, any case, is a marker of a relationship of a noun phrase in the sentence. Nominal marks a subject, Accusative - the object of a transitive verbs etc. (Passivie voice etc shuffle things around but the general arrangement stays the same). You can say, the verb hands out cases and nouns receive them.

In particular, it doesn't matter whether the NP receiving the case is a real noun or a stand-in, a pronoun. That's true for English, Russian or any other language.
Now, it's debatable whether "be" is a real transitive verb and so should assign accusative case to its object. Nevertheless, whetever case it would assign, it'd it uniformly to nouns and pronouns. That's just how cases work.

[oryx_and_crake]

This is mostly true, but I cannot agree with you on one of these points.

You will say Степанов был жуликом ([Nom.] is [Instr.]) only if you define who he was by his professional skills. However if you want to describe his personality, you will have to say Степанов был жулик ([Nom.] is [Nom.]).

[malaya-zemlya.livejournal.com]

good point.

[oryx_and_crake]

I think we could do better with a different example.

The map is here. I am here. - both are clearly in nominative. (I hope that no one would like to say "Me am/is here.")
The map is here. Here is the map.
I am here. Here am I. - clearly these two are equivalent.

Вот карта. Вот я. The actors (subjects) are я and карта respectively. What do I do? I am (here). In Russian the verb быть is normally omitted, but the subject is still in nominative.

[malaya-zemlya.livejournal.com]

Heh, we are now entering really obscure parts of linguistics :)

The sentences "вот ...." are rather unusual ones, because they _point_, while normal sentences describe a state of affairs or an event. As such they are closer to nouns in function than to verbs. They also require the subject to be visible to both speaker and listener. Compare:

Где пиво? здесь пиво (points at a closed refigerator)
Где пиво? вот пиво (points at a bottle which cannot possibly be in a closed refigerator)

Since they are noun-like, the "вот " sentences don't behave like normal verbal sentences.

* They are not headed by a verb, not even "есть"
You can say "вот есть пиво", yes, but it is really a short form of "у нас есть(имеется) пиво, вот оно"
* They don't work with the whole range of grammatical devices that are suited to verbal sentences. "вот пиво" cannot be put into past or future tense, cannot be converted into questions etc etc.

* They cannot be easily converted into subordinate clauses:
"Мы веселимся, потому что вот пиво" becomes grammatically correct only after a few cold ones :^)

* On the other hand, they can be easily made into noun phrases by adding a determiner:

"Выпей вот это пиво"

or as hilbillies say "Drink this here beer"