Accusative absolute
The accusative absolute is a grammatical construction found in some languages. It is an absolute construction found in the accusative case.
Greek
In ancient Greek, the accusative case is used adverbially with participles of impersonal verbs, similarly to the genitive absolute.[1] For example:
| συνδόξαν | τῷ | πατρὶ | καὶ | τῇ | μητρὶ | γαμεῖ | τὴν | Κυαξάρου | θυγατέρα |
| seeming good-acc | the-masc.dat.sg | father-dat | and | the-fem.dat.sg | mother-dat | marries | the-fem.acc.sg | Cyaxares-gen | daughter-acc |
| "It seeming good to his father and mother, he marries the daughter of Cyaxares." (Xenophon, Cyropaedia 8.5.28) | |||||||||
German
In German, a noun phrase can be put in the accusative to indicate that the sentence's subject has the property it describes.[2] For example:
| Neben | ihm | saß | der | dünnhaarige | Pianist, | den | Kopf | im | Nacken, | und | lauschte. |
| next to | him | sat | the | thin-haired | pianist | the-masc.acc.sg | head | in the | neck | and | listened |
| "The thin-haired pianist, his head back (lit. his head in his neck), sat next to him and listened." | |||||||||||
Latin
The accusative absolute is sometimes found in place of the ablative absolute in the Latin of Late Antiquity as, for example, in the writings of Gregory of Tours and Jordanes. This likely arose when the pronunciations of the ablative and accusative singulars merged, since the final -m of the accusative singular was no longer pronounced, even in the Classical era. The accusative absolute is also found with plural nouns where the ablative and accusative are not similar in pronunciation.
Sources
- Balme, Maurice and Gilbert Lawall. Athenadze: An Introduction to Ancient Greek. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. pp 172.
- Duden 4, Die Grammatik, 5th edition (1995), p. 624