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There exist a reasonable number of bigovernate prepositions in German; these are an, auf, hinter, in, neben, über, unter, vor and zwischen. [1] These prepositions can take either the accusative or dative grammatical cases. The accusative case is used when there is movement relative to the object with which the preposition agrees (e.g.
The normal word order in German is to put the dative in front of the accusative (as in the example above). However, since the German dative is marked in form, it can also be put after the accusative: Ich schickte das Buch dem Mann(e). The (e) after Mann and Kind signifies a now largely archaic -e ending for certain nouns in the dative.
A third group of prepositions, called two way prepositions, take either the accusative case or the dative case depending on the phrase's exact meaning. If the statement describes movement across a boundary then the phrase is accusative. Other situations, including movement within a confined area, take the dative case. For example: Ich schlafe ...
The grammar of the German language is quite similar to that of the other Germanic languages.Although some features of German grammar, such as the formation of some of the verb forms, resemble those of English, German grammar differs from that of English in that it has, among other things, cases and gender in nouns and a strict verb-second word order in main clauses.
German sentence structure is the structure to which the German language adheres. German is an OV (Object-Verb) language. [ 1 ] Additionally, German, like all west Germanic languages except English, [ note 1 ] uses V2 word order , though only in independent clauses.
In Standard German, there are prepositions which govern each of the three oblique cases: Accusative, Dative, and Genitive.Case marking in German is largely observed on elements which modify the noun (e.g. determiners, adjectives).
The dative case, which expresses the recipient of an action, the indirect object of a verb. In English, the prepositions to, from and for most commonly denote this case analytically. The instrumental case, which is used to express the object, with which its activity is performed. It roughly corresponds to the prepositions with and by.
The gender matches the receiver's gender (not the object's gender) for the dative case, and the owner's gender for the genitive. Dative: Ich gebe die Karten dem Mann – I give the cards to the man. Genitive: Die Entwicklung unseres Dorfes – The growth of our village. For further details as to the usage of German cases, see German grammar.