Prepositions Governing the Nominative Case |
Only two Russian prepositions are used with the Nominative case and those are used semi-idiomatically.
1. The preposition за+Nom is used only in questions with the interrogative pronoun что, where it is a synonym of the adjectival pronoun какой in the sense of 'what kind of', as the following examples illustrate.
Что она за женщина? What kind of woman is she? | Какая она женщина? |
Что Володя за студент? What kind of student is Volodya? | Какой студент Володя? |
2. The other preposition which governs the nominative case is в+Nom, used exclusively with plural objects to indicate joining an organization of some type, as illustrated in the following examples.
Маша недавно вышла в рабочие. | Masha recently became worker. |
Дима пошёл в политики. | Dima has become a politician. |
Otherwise, the nominative case is used only to mark the subject of the clause or sentence. (Of course, it also is used to mark the citation form of a noun or adjective listed in the dictionary or used as a label on an object in the real world.)