Nominative Construction

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Nominative Construction

 

a model of a sentence, which is common to many languages, including the Indo-European, Uralic, and Turkic.

The characteristic morphological correlates (interrelated units) of a nominative construction are the nominative case of the subject, the subject conjugation of the predicate verb, and the accusative case of the direct object. The construction is organized by all verbs regardless of their transitivity or intransitivity. However, only transitive verbs can distinguish two variants of the construction: active and passive (for example, “the workers are building the factory” and “the factory is being built by the workers”).

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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