Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics.pdf

Dictionary of language and linguistics 824obligatory vs optional [Lat. obligatio ‘thestate of being legally etc. liable,’ optio‘choice’]Property of rules which specifies the conditions of their application. The distinctionapplies to all levels of description and has an important role in the syntactic and semanticdescription of sentence structure based on verb valence. In contrast to valenceindependentelements in a sentence, such as free adjuncts and attributes, actants whichdepend on valence can be divided into two groups: valence positions which must be filledand those which do not need to be filled under certain conditions (i.e. optional); cf.Caroline is writing a letter to her mother vs Caroline is writing (something), butCaroline gave her mother a present vs *Caroline gave her mother. This structurallybased distinction refers exclusively to grammatical completeness or wellformedness; itdoes not always correspond to semantic-pragmatic factors such as completeness anddifferentiation of information. For other uses of this distinction, also free variationand transformations.ReferenceSanders, G.A. 1977. On the notions ‘optional’ and ‘obligatory’ in linguistics. Ling 195. 5–47.oblique case [Lat. obliquus ‘slanting’]Term for the genitive, dative, accusative and ablative cases which depend on the verb,as opposed to the casus rectus.caseReferencesoblique objectSyntactic function filled by a noun phrase in an oblique case other than the accusativeor dative, or by a prepositional or adpositional phrase: Ger. Er klagte den Mann des