used to mark a direct object. This is precisely what happens in Georgian, in the restricted environment of the second or third conjugation verbs in the aorist series. In Georgian, the classification of verbs according to the agentive or patientive nature of their subject has to do with performing an action, regardless of whether the subject is in control or not. (There are some exceptions to this; weather verbs and verbs of emission of light and sound are usually zero-place predicates, and thus have no agent at all.) The division between classes is conventional and rigid; each verb receives the class that typically corresponds to it. Where the subject is typically an active performer, it is marked as ergative, even if in some specific instances the action might be outside the control of the subject. Therefore, Georgian active alignment is said to be of the "split-S" type. Case system Georgian has seven grammatical cases: nominative, ergative (also known in the Kartvelological literature as the narrative (motxrobiti) case, due to the rather inaccurate suggestion of regular ergativity, and that this case generally only occurs in the aorist series, which usually moves the narrative forward), dative, genitive, instrumental, adverbial and vocative. The nominative, ergative and dative are core cases, and due to the complex morphosyntactic alignment of Georgian, each one has several different functions and also overlap with each other, in different contexts. They will be treated together with the verb system. The non-core cases are genitive, instrumental, adverbial and vocative. The genitive case is the equivalent of the preposition of or the possessive clitic -s in English. In the phrase "the republic of Georgia", the word "Georgia" is in the genitive case: Sakartvelos resp'ublik'a. The instrumental case corresponds to the preposition with in English, as in "he is cutting with a knife", where the word "knife" is in the instrumental case. It also occurs with the objects of certain postpositions. The adverbial case commonly marks adverbial phrases. It is also used in some other contexts, especially when using names of languages. For example, in the sentence "Can you translate this into Georgian?", Georgian is in the adverbial case. The vocative case is used when addressing someone. For example, a mother calls her child with bat'ono? (meaning "sir?"). Nouns The declension of a noun depends on whether the root of the noun ends with a vowel or a consonant. If the root