This book is concerned with the treatment of case in modern linguistics, but from the perspective of the idea of case as it developed in preceding centuries. This idea was that case inflexions are only one means of expressing the semantic relations that arguments can bear to predicators; the latter can also be expressed analytically (by adpositions) or positionally. Such an idea was not adopted in most modern theorizing on case; case grammar has been an attempt to do so. The present book demonstrates the problems in not adopting this traditional view of case, particularly in the various develo ... More

This book is concerned with the treatment of case in modern linguistics, but from the perspective of the idea of case as it developed in preceding centuries. This idea was that case inflexions are only one means of expressing the semantic relations that arguments can bear to predicators; the latter can also be expressed analytically (by adpositions) or positionally. Such an idea was not adopted in most modern theorizing on case; case grammar has been an attempt to do so. The present book demonstrates the problems in not adopting this traditional view of case, particularly in the various developments of transformational grammar. It implements a localist case grammar, wherein semantic relations are differentiated in terms of spatial relationships and the different manifestations of semantic (or ‘case’) relations are associated with a single category. The latter part of the book shows that such a case grammar is part of a general notional grammar — a grammar whose categories and structures are notionally based, in the same way that phonology is phonically based (natural). Thus, distribution alone is not sufficient to establish syntactic categories: only the distribution of semantically prototypical members of a category (say, concrete nouns, dynamic verbs) is relevant. Various (interlocking) basic issues in modern linguistics are scrutinized from this viewpoint: autonomy, syntactic abstractness (including movement and category-change, empty categories, decomposition), universal grammar, innateness, and linguistic creativity.