case grammar

An approach to grammatical analysis devised by the American linguist Charles Fillmore (b. 1929) in the late 1960s, within the general orientation of GENERATIVE grammar. It is primarily a reaction against the STANDARD THEORY analysis of sentences, where notions such as SUBJECT, OBJECT, etc., are neglected in favor of analyses in terms of NP, VP, etc. By focusing on syntactic FUNCTIONS, however, it was felt that several important kinds of SEMANTIC relationship could be represented, which it would otherwise be difficult or impossible to capture. A set of sentences such as The key opened the door, The door was opened by/with the key, The door opened, The man opened the door with a key, etc., illustrate several ‘stable’ semantic roles, despite the varying SURFACE grammatical STRUCTURES. In each case the key is ‘instrumental’, the door is the entity affected by the action, and so on. Case grammar FORMALIZES this insight using a MODEL which shows the influence of the predicate calculus of formal logic: the DEEP STRUCTURE of a sentence has two CONSTITUENTS, MODALITY (features of TENSE, MOOD, ASPECT and NEGATION, relating to the sentence as a whole) and PROPOSITION (within which the VERB is considered central, and the various semantic roles that ELEMENTS of structure can have are listed with reference to it, and categorized as cases).

The term ‘case’ is used because of the similarity with several of the traditional meanings covered by this term, but the deep-structure cases recognized by the theory do not systematically correspond with anything in the surface morphology or syntax. The original proposal set up six cases (AGENTIVE, INSTRUMENTAL, DATIVE, FACTITIVE, LOCATIVE and OBJECTIVE) and gave rules for their combination in defining the use of verbs, e.g. a verb like open can be used with an objective and instrumental case (e.g. The key opened the door), or with an additional agent (e.g. The man opened the door with a key). Later, other cases were suggested (SOURCE, GOAL, COUNTER-AGENT), some cases were reinterpreted and relabeled, and certain cases came to be given special study, it being claimed that they were more fundamental (location and direction, in particular). In a locative or LOCALIST case theory, for example, structures such as there is a table, the table has legs, the table’s legs, and many more, could each be analyzed as having an underlying locational feature. The problems in formalizing this conception of linguistic structure have remained very great, and case grammar came to attract somewhat less interest in the mid-1970s; but it has proved to be influential on the terminology and classification of several later theories, especially the theory of THEMATIC ROLES.