Lexical case

The lexical case is the opposite of the structural case (especially in generative grammar ) . While the structural cases, especially the nominative and most of the occurrences of the accusative, depend on the sentence structure as such, the appearance of a lexical case depends on the properties of individual verbs. Typically, there are irregularities in the marking of objects that have to be learned with individual verbs.

In some special cases, an accusative is also to be regarded as a lexical case, namely when it serves to mark the only addition to a verb; this is then a "lexical" property of individual verbs (so-called impersonal verbs), which deviate from the rule that the only addition to a verb is in the nominative, e.g. B .:

I'm freezing

I'm thirsty

Examples of objects with a lexical case from New High German are:

Someone helped the injured person (dative, depends on "help", see accusative for "supply", "support" etc.,)

One thought of the deceased (genitive, depends on "remember")

Examples from Latin :

Lexical accusative with genitive object:

Pudet me eius.

ashamed - present 3sg. i-akk . ergen .

(Literally: "I'm ashamed of him.")

"I'm ashamed of him."

Ablative as case of the object:

Patientia nostra abuteris

Patient- ablative. unser- abl. missbrauchen- 2.pers.sg.

"You are abusing our patience".

Lexical case can naturally only occur in languages rich in morphology that distinguish several case forms of a noun, e.g. B. Ancient Greek , Icelandic , Hindi and the majority of the Slavic languages . Incidentally, the phenomenon can also be seen as related to the phenomenon of prepositional objects, where a verb requires a certain preposition to supplement it instead of a certain case.

Quirky case

A special case of lexical case is the phenomenon of the quirky case , in which additions to typical object cases such as dative assume properties of subjects (this phenomenon does not exist in German, but can be found in Icelandic ).

Individual evidence

↑ Example from: http://www.dr-peter-wieners.de/sonstiges/grammatik-latein/casus/der-bloe-ablativ-.html
^ Martin Haspelmath: Terminology of case . In: A. Malchukov, A. Spencer (Eds.): Handbook of Case . Oxford University Press, July 2006 (English, mpg.de [PDF]): “[…] the assignment of inherent case is tied to a particular semantic role (“ theta-role ”), or to lexical properties of the governing head ( eg dative case assigned by the German verb help 'help'). [This] kind of case is also known as quirky case , especially when the NP bearing the lexically determined case can be regarded as the subject (as happens famously in Icelandic). "

[1] Example from: http://www.dr-peter-wieners.de/sonstiges/grammatik-latein/casus/der-bloe-ablativ-.html

[2] Martin Haspelmath: Terminology of case . In: A. Malchukov, A. Spencer (Eds.): Handbook of Case . Oxford University Press, July 2006 (English, mpg.de [PDF]): “[…] the assignment of inherent case is tied to a particular semantic role (“ theta-role ”), or to lexical properties of the governing head ( eg dative case assigned by the German verb help 'help'). [This] kind of case is also known as quirky case , especially when the NP bearing the lexically determined case can be regarded as the subject (as happens famously in Icelandic). "