Glossary Accusative case

Glossary
Accusative case - The case of the direct object or prepositional object, only visible on pronouns in English, e.g. me, in He saw me, also called the objective case.
Agreement - formal relation between two elements, so the form of one element is required to correspond with the form of the other.
Ambiguity/ambiguous - Word (lexical ambiguity) or sentence (structural ambiguity) with more than one meaning.
Analogy- Something, e.g. a verbal ending, may be compared to another similar ending and changed to make it more similar.
Analytic - Of a language, grammatical information comes in the form of separate words not of endings on nouns and verbs.
Anglo-Norman – the variety of French spoken by those who invaded England at the time of the Norman Conquest, and their descendants.
Antecedent - What a pronoun refers to, e.g. the noun that a relative pronoun such as who refers to in the man who(m) I saw. Antecedent is used more generally though for any pronoun that refers to a noun.
Apposition - The second part of Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. It rephrases the first and provides extra information; similar to a non‐restrictive relative clause.
Case - In English, case is only visible on pronouns. Thus, she in She saw me has nominative case, i.e. is used in subject position, and me has accusative or objective case, i.e. is used in object position.
Clause- Unit containing a lexical verb, see also main clause, subordinate clause.
Celtic – one of the branches of Indo-European, from which are descended, amongst others, the present-day languages Breton, Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic and Welsh.
Cognate – of words, derived from the same historical source. For example, the English word ‘father’ and the French word ‘pere’ are cognate, both being descended (through Proto-Germanic and Latin respectively) from the same Proto-Indo-European word.
Comparative - Forms such as greater that compare one situation or entity with another.
Complement- Complements to verbs are divided into direct and indirect object, subject predicate, object predicate, prepositional and phrasal object. Nouns, adjectives, and prepositions can have a single complement.
Dative – grammatical case usually exhibited by a noun phrase often functioning as the indirect object of the verb.
Declension – a set either of nouns or of adjectives, which share the same paradigm.
Definite ~ indefinite – Old English adjectives had two declensions; where the adjective was preceded by a demonstrative or possessive it followed the definite declension, and elsewhere it followed the indefinite declension.
Genitive case - The case that a possessive has, e.g. Catweazle's in Catweazle's book.
Genitive – grammatical case usually exhibited by a noun phrase when the phrase is being used in a possessive function.
Germanic – one of the branches of Indo-European, from which are descended, amongst others, the present-day languages English, Dutch, Frisian, German, Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish.
Government – process by which one phrase has control over another, for example a verb may determine the case assigned to an object.
Head – element within a compound or derived word that determines the syntactic status, or word class, of the whole word. Semantically, also, a compound noun whose head is X usually denotes a type of X. For example, ‘house’ is the head of the compound ‘greenhouse’. Many linguists would also analyze some derivational affixes as heads, e.g. -er as the head of the noun ‘teacher’.
Indo-European – the language family from which are descended not only the Germanic languages, but a very wide range of languages throughout Europe and many parts of the Middle East and Indian sub-continent.
Inflection - change in the form of a word to express a function or agreement.
Innate faculty - Enables us to acquire language.
Lexicon – inventory of lexical items, seen as part of a native speaker’s knowledge of his or her language.
Nominal – belonging to the word class ‘noun’, or having the characteristics of a noun.
Nominative case - grammatical case exhibited by a noun phrase functioning as the subject of the verb, and usually (but by no means always) expressing semantically the agent of the action that the verb denotes.
Number – grammatical category associated especially with nouns. In English, ‘plural’ and ‘singular’ numbers are distinguished inflectionally (e.g. ‘cats’versus ‘cat’). In Old English there was also a dual category, occasionally used with pronouns and adjectives.
Non‐restrictive RC - A clause that provides background information to the noun it modifies; is often set apart from the rest of the sentence through commas or comma intonation.
Noun - A word such as table, freedom, book, love.
Numeral - A word such as one, two.
Proper noun - A noun used for names, e.g. Bertha, Arizona.
Synthetic - Of a language, grammatical information is marked by means of endings on nouns and verbs rather than as separate words.
Tree - A representation of the units/phrases of a sentence by means of branches and nodes.
Universal Grammar - Grammatical properties shared by all languages but now more and more replaced by general cognitive abilities.