My textbook has the sentence, «Мы живём в гостинице, которую построили финны.» Given that который is in feminine here, I assume they're it refers to гостиница. What is the reasoning for который being in the accusative case in this sentence? I don't understand what verb has гостиница, and thus который, as an object in this sentence.
1 Answer
Maybe a translation will help:
We live in a hotel, which the Finns have built.
If you were to turn the subordinate clause into a stand-alone sentence, you would get:
Финны построили гостиницу. (The Finns have built the hotel.)
In this sentence гостиница
is the object of построили
, and it must be in the accusative case. Hence которую
is also in accusative.
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4Basically, "который" takes gender/number from the noun it refers to, and then you put it the grammatical case required by its role in the subordinate clause. Here, in subordinate clause it is a direct object (what Finns built), hence Accusative. Were it "A hotel I have read about", you'd use "Гостиница, о которой я читал". Jul 22, 2014 at 0:35