Grammatical Cases in Japanese

Introduction

Cases describe the grammatical functions of nouns, pronouns and noun phrases, such as whether they are the subject of the clause or a subordinate object.

Nominative Case

The nominative case, also called the subjective, marks the subject of a phrase. The subject is the noun (or pronoun) that performs the action of the verb. For example, in the phrase "She helped him", the subject is "she", who performs the action of helping.

Accusative Case

The accusative case deals with direct objects. In English for example, in the sentence "I drink coffee", the direct object is "coffee", and thus it is in the accusative case.

It is sometimes called the oblique case, especially when combined with the dative case.

Dative Case

The dative case marks indirect objects, which are usually used with a preposition. For example in the phrase "talk to him", the indirect object is "him" because it is the thing to which the action is given.

It is sometimes called the oblique case too, especially when combined with the accusative case.

Accusative with Dative Case

When the accusative and dative cases are used together - such as when both a direct object is given to a indirect object - the accusative takes on a special inflection to avoid phonological ambiguities.

Oblique Case

The oblique case is used to mark nouns and pronouns as being direct and indirect objects. For example, in the phrase "I gave it to him" both "it" and "him" and objects, and thus are in the oblique case.

Genitive Case

Also called the possessive case, the genitive case marks objects as pertaining or belonging to another object. For example, in the phrase "it is mine", the pronoun "mine" is in the genitive case.

Disjunctive Case

Sometimes called the prepositional case, the disjunctive case marks objects are being separated (or disjoined) from the verb usually by a preposition.

For example, in the phrase "bring it to me", the word "me" is in the disjunctive case.

Comitative Case

The comitative case marks pronouns as going "with" the action of the phrase.

Instrumental Case

The instrumental case is similar to what is sometimes called the comitative case when describing certain Latin-based languages. That is, it denotes object as being "with" or "without" a subject.

Prepositional Case

Also called the locative, the prepositional case was used historically to denote the location of an object, but today is only used after certain prepositions, which makes it unique among the cases. While the prepositions that use this case still fulfill the locative role to a degree, they do not always deal with physical location.