Adverbial Uses of the Dative and Accusative Cases

Adverbial Uses of the Dative

Dative of Reference. The dative expresses the person or thing most immediately affected. Sometimes rather than apply to a particular verb or adjective, the dative may refer to the entire statement, as in “Keep your thoughts to yourself” (tua consilia tibi habē.) The dative can also express the person who is disavantaged: dī mihi mentem abstulērunt (“The gods took away my wits.”); or the person in whose view a thing holds true: erit ille mihi semper deus (“That man will always be a god in my opinion.”). This is called the dative of reference.

Ethical Dative. The dative of a personal pronoun may express a sort of emotional interjection into the sentence: quid mihi ille agit? (“What, tell me, is he doing?”); quid tibi vīs? (“What, really, do you want?”, lit., ‘What do you want for yourself?”).

Dative of Purpose. The dative may express the end or purpose for which a thing exists. This often occurs with a second dative of a person (the so-called double dative construction). nōbīs odiō sunt: “They are a cause of hatred for us” (lit., ‘They exist to us for hatred’). suīs salūtī erat: “He was a salvation for his men”.

Dative of the Possessor. The dative of the person, used with esse as the substantive verb, denotes the person who owns a thing. mihi liber est: “I have a book” (lit., ‘A book exists for me’); as distinguished from liber est meus: “The book is mine”.

Adverbial Uses of the Accusative

Adverbial Accusative. The basic function of the accusative case is to define or limit. The accusative may serve adverbially to limit the extent of a reference:

Accusative of Extent in Time. The accusative may define for how long a thing holds true. trēs diēs morābāmur: “We waited for three days.” The accusative also defines a measure in space: mūrus quinque pedēs altus: “a wall five feet high”. Note this idiom with expressions of age: sēdecim annōs nātus sum: “I am sixteen years old”.

Accusative of Exclamations. The accusative may be used to express an exclamation:

Cognate (Internal) Accusativess. The accusative of course defines the external object of transitive verbs: puerum vidēmus = “We see the boy.” Here puerum is the external object of the act of seeing. Such verbs as need external objects to make complete statements (“The boy threw ➝ the ball”) as said to be verbs of incomplete predication.

But the accusative may also be used with intransitive verbs – verbs which merely represent an activity or state of being – to define the content of the activity. “I write.” This is a verb of complete predication, and this statement hence is a complete sentence. The content of the activity or the product of it may also be represented by an accusative, but the noun in the accusative must be related to the activity of the verb. Hence, in the statements “I write a poem / a book / a hymn”, the nouns all describe some form of the activity of writing. They are related or cognate to the activity of the verb, and hence are known as cognate object nouns.

Note that some verbs in Latin take two accusatives, one an external object, one a cognate object:

In the latter example the indirect question functions as a cognate accusative to rogō.