Linguistics Encyclopedia.pdf

A-Z 91
d. I paid Harry five dollars for a dozen roses.
Faced by criticism from Anderson (1971) and Mellema (1974), Fillmore accepts that
there are some semantic generalizations which can only be formulated if the grammatical
relations of subject and object are recognized at some level of representation in
grammatical theory. For instance, whether a noun phrase be given a holistic or a
partitive interpretation seems to depend on its grammatical status as object or subject, as
exemplified in (1) The garden was swarming with bees (holistic: the whole garden is
swarming with bees; the garden in subject position) and (2) I loaded the truck with hay
(holistic: the whole truck is loaded; the truck in object position); versus (3) Bees were
swarming in the garden (partitive: the garden is not necessarily full of bees) and (4) I
loaded hay onto the truck (partitive: the truck may not be full of hay).
A major worry for case theory is that none of the linguists who have developed
grammars in which the notion of case figures has been able to arrive at a principled way
of defining the cases, or of deciding how many cases there are, or of deciding when two
cases have something in common as opposed to being simply variants of one case (Cruse,
1973). For example, Huddleston (1970) points out that in The wind opened the door, the
wind may be interpreted as having its own energy and hence as being agent, or as being
merely a direct cause of the door opening, and hence as instrument, or as having a role
which is distinct from both agent and instrument, called, perhaps, ‘force’. On yet another
view, a case feature ‘cause’ can be seen as a feature of both agent and instrument
(Fillmore, 1977, p. 71). Fillmore thinks that this problem may be explained with
reference to the notions of perspective and of meaning being relativized to scenes
mentioned above. The wind is brought into perspective in the clause and is thus a nuclear
element. And (pp. 79–80): ‘perspectivizing corresponds, in English, to determining the
structuring of a clause in terms of the nuclear grammatical relations’.
The obvious attractions of case grammar include the clear semantic relevance of
notions such as agency, causation, location, advantage to someone, etc. These are easily
identifiable across languages, and are held by many psychologists to play an important
part in child language acquisition. However (Lyons, 1977a, pp. 87–8):
case-grammar is no longer seen by the majority of linguists working
within the general framework of transformational-generative grammar as
a viable alternative to the standard theory. The reason is that when it
comes to classifying the totality of the verbs in a language in terms of the
deep-structure cases that they govern, the semantic criteria which define
these cases are all too often unclear or in conflict.
In spite of its failings, case grammar has been important in drawing the attention of an
initially sceptical tradition of linguistic study to the importance of relating semantic cases
or thematic roles to syntactic descriptions.
K.M.