1226: Cases are from Verbs Apr 18, 2018

Even though case is reflected on nouns, and sometimes adjectives and determiners, verbs assign case. In all languages—except for one very famous example which will come up here some time this week—verbs can either be transitive (i.e. there can be a direct object) or intransitive (there is no direct object), even if it is a similar meaning. For instance, 'kill' is a transitive verb, and one can say "he killed her" but 'die' is an intransitive verb and no one can say "he died her". In ergative-absolutive languages, these are especially important because they change the case of the "subject" as well. All of these cases are determined by the verbs, and this is still considered to be the case in situations where the verb is omitted.