Oblique case


In grammar, an oblique or objective case is a nominal case that is used when a noun phrase is the object of either a verb or a preposition. A noun or pronoun in the oblique case can generally appear in any role except as subject, for which the nominative case is used. The term objective case is generally preferred by modern English grammarians, where it supplanted Old English's dative and accusative.
When the two terms are contrasted, they differ in the ability of a word in the oblique case to function as a possessive attributive; whether English has an oblique rather than an objective case then depends on how "proper" or widespread one considers the dialects where such usage is employed.
An oblique case often contrasts with an unmarked case, as in English oblique him and them vs. nominative he and they. However, the term oblique is also used for languages without a nominative case, such as ergative–absolutive languages; in the Northwest Caucasian languages, for example, the oblique-case marker serves to mark the ergative, dative, and applicative case roles, contrasting with the absolutive case, which is unmarked.

Bulgarian

, an analytic Slavic language, also has an oblique case form for pronouns:
Dative role:
An objective case is marked on the English personal pronouns and as such serves the role of the accusative and dative cases that other Indo-European languages employ. These forms are often called object pronouns. They serve a variety of grammatical functions which they would not in languages that differentiate the two. An example using first person singular objective pronoun me:
The pronoun me is not inflected differently in any of these uses; it is used for all grammatical relationships except the genitive case of possession and a non-disjunctive nominative case as the subject.

French

Old French had a nominative case and an oblique case, called ' and ' respectively.
In Modern French, the two cases have mostly merged and the cas régime has survived for the majority of nouns. For example, the word "conte ":
In some cases, both the cas sujet and cas régime of one noun have survived but produced two nouns in Modern French with different meanings. Example today's ' means "friend" and ' is "companion", but in Old French these were different declensions of the same noun.

Other

has an oblique case for pronouns which is used exclusively with postpositions. For nouns, the oblique and dative cases are merged.
Kurdish has an oblique for pronouns, objects, and for objects of Izafe constructs.