Nominative and Accusative Cases in English and Urdu: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Languages show variations in terms of their syntactic patterns. Their comparison reveals the effective strategies to explore and illustrate the difficulties that language learners may come across in the course of acquiring any new language. This study aims at the exploration of nominative and accusative properties in English and Urdu with the help of Chomsky’s Case theory as first introduced within the boundaries of the Government and Binding theory in 1981. It effectively presents the properties of any nouns in order to be declared as either nominative or accusative cases in any languages. Along with the case theory, the researcher has used qualitative and further the descriptive and content analysis approach as applied to the few English sentences taken from the New Headway Workbook by Liz and John Soars, meant for language learners at Elementary level. The study presents the thorough analysis of few English sentences and their Urdu translations to highlight similarities and differences as present in English and Urdu nominatives and accusatives in relation to other parts of speech as these properties haven’t been explored by the previous researches instead the focus has been on ergativity in Urdu.