R E F OR T R E S U M E S ED 019 631 AL ODD 413 THE CASE FOR CASE. BY- FILLMORE, CHARLES J. PUB DATE APR 67 ECRS PRICEMF-$0.75 HC-$5.48 135P. DESCRIPTORS- *LANGUAGE UNIVERSALS;*GRAMMAR, *DEEP STRUCTURE) *SURFACE STRUCTURE, LINGUISTICTHEORY, LANGUAGE TYPOLOGY: PHRASE STRUCTURE, TRANSFORMATIONTHEORY (LANGUAGE), TRANSFORMATION GENERATIVE GRAMMAR,NOMINALS, CASE, BASE COMPONENT, IN THIS PAPER, PREPARED FOR THEAPRIL 1967 TEXAS SYMPOSIUM ON LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS,IT IS PROPOSED THAT THE GRAMMATICAL NOTION "CASE" DESERVESA PLACE IN THE BASE COMPONENT OF THE GRAMMAR OF EVERYLANGUAGE. IT IS ARGUED THAT PAST RESEARCH HAS NOT LED TOVALID INSIGHTS ON CASE RELATIONSHIPS AND THAT WHAT IS NEEDEDIS A CONCEPTION OF BASE STRUCTURE IN WHICH CASE RELATIONSHIPSARE PRIMITIVE TERMS OF THE THEORY AND IN WHICH SUCHCONCEPTS AS "SUBJECT" AND "DIRECT OBJECT" ARE MISSING. THELATTER ARE REGARDED AS PROPER ONLY TO THE SURFACE STRUCTUREOF SOME (BUT POSSIBLY NOT ALL). LANGUAGES. BASIC TOTHESE ARGUMENTS ARE TWO ASSUMPTIONS NOW TAKEN FOR GRANTED BYGENERATIVE GRAMMARIANS--(1) THE CENTRALITY OF SYNTAX,AND (2) THE IMPORTANCE OF COVERT CATEGORIES. THEAUTHOR PROPOSES "THAT THERE ARE MANY SEMANTICALLY RELEVANTSYNTACTIC REALTIONSHIFS INVOLVING NOUNS AND THE STRUCTURESTHAT CONTAIN THEM, THAT THESE RELATIONSHIPS ARE IN LARGEFART COVERT BUT ARE NEVERTHELESS EMPIRICALLY DISCOVERABLE,THAT THEY FORM A SPECIFIC FINITE SET, AND THATOBSERVATIONS MADE ABOUT THEM WILL TURN OUT TO HAVE CONSIDERABLECROSS-LINGUISTIC VALIDITY." HE REFERS TO THESEAS "CASE" RELATIONSHIPS AND THE GRAMMAR PROPOSED AND OUTLINED HEREIS "CASE GRAMMAR." THE SUBSTANTIVE MODIFICATION TO THETHEORY OF TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR WHICH HE PROPOSES AMOUNTS TOA REINTRODUCTION OF THE "CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK" INTERPRETATIONOF CASE SYSTEMS BUT WITH A CLEARER UNDERSTANDING OF THEDIFFERENCE BETWEEN DEEP AND SURFACE STRUCTURE. THE SENTENCEIN ITS BASIC STRUCTURE CONSISTS OF A VERB AND ONE OR MORENOUN PHRASES, EACH ASSOCIATED WITH THE VERB IN A PARTICULARCASE RELATIONSHIP. THE "EXPLANATORY" USE OF THISFRAMEWORK RESIDES IN THE NECESSARY CLAIM THAT, ALTHOUGH THERECAN BE COMPOUND INSTANCES OF A SINGLE CASE (THROUGHNOUN PHRASE CONJUNCTION), EACH CASE RELATIONSHIP OCCURS ONLYONCE.IN A SIMPLE SENTENCE. THIS DOCUMENT WILL APPEAR IN"PROCEEDINGS OF THE TEXAS SYMPOSIUM ON LANGUAGE UNIVERSALS,APRIL 13 -15, 1967," EMMON BACH AND ROBERT HARMS, EDITORS,HOLT, RINEHART AND WINSTON. (JD) U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION & WELFARE OFFICE OF EDUCATION THIS DOCUMENT iIAS BEEN REPRODUCED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED FROM THE PERSON OR ORGANIZATION ORIGINATING IT.POINTS OF VIEW OR OPINIONS STATED DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT OFFICIAL OFFICE OF EDUCATION CZ) POSITION OR POLICY. The Case for Case* 1-44 by "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS 111111111111 MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED :PtLLMORE BY Cif ARLE5J TO ERIC AND ORGANIZATIONS OPERATING Charles J. Fillmore UNDER AGREEMENTS WITH THE U.S. OFFICE OF The Ohio State University EDUCATION. FURTHER REPRODUCTION OUTSIDE THE ERIC SYSTEM REQUIRES PERMISSION OF THE MUM OWNER." To appear in Emmon Bach and Robert Harms, eds., Proceedings of the Texas Symposium, on Language Universals April 13-15, 1967 (Holt, Rinehart and Winston) *The time I needed for preparing this study was created by an act of the College of Arts and Sciences ofThe Ohio State University: I was released from teaching duties during the winter quarter of 1967. I gratefully acknowledge this boost and hope that I may be forgiven for changing topicsmid- quarter. Many co-workers have kept me supplied with suggest- ions, criticisms and challenges during the past few months. I am particularly indebted to D. Terence Langendoen(Ohio State), George Lakoff (Harvard) and Paul M. Postal (Queens College). I shall probably soon regret that I have not always been wise enough to follow their counsel. AL 000 413 The Case for Case Charles J. Fillmore The Ohio State University Prepared for the 1967 Texas Symposium on Linguistic Universals, April 13-15. Speculation on language universals has not always and everywhere been viewed as a fully respectable pastime for the scientific linguist. The writer recalls a Linguistic Institute lecture of not many summers ago in which it was announced that the only really secure generalization on language that linguists are prepared to make is that "some members of some human communi- ties have been observed to interact by means of vocal noises." Times have changed, it is a pleasure to report, and this is partly because we now have clearer ideas about what linguistic theories are theories of, and partly because some linguists are willing to risk the danger of being dead wrong. Scholars who have striven to uncover syntactic features common to all of the world's languages have generally addressed themselves to three intimately related but distinguishable orders of questions, and they are: (a) what are the formal and substantive universals of syntactic structure? (b) is there a universal base, and, ifso, what are its properties? and (c) are thereany universally valid constraints on the ways in which deep structure representations of sentences are given expression in the surface structure? Concerning formal universals we find such proposalsas Chomsky's, that each grammar has a base component capable of characterizing the underlying syntactic structure of just the sentences in the ,paim=e language at hand and which contains at least a set of trans- formation rules the function of which is to map the underlying structures provided by the base component into structures more closely identifiable with phonetic descriptions of utterances 1 in that language. A representative statement on substantive 1NoamChomsky, ASPECTS OF THE THEORY OF SYNTAX, MIT Press (1965), pp. 251.27-30. syntactic universals is Lyons' assertion that every grammar reequires such categories as Noun, Predicator and Sentence, but that other grammatical categories and featuresmay be differently 2 arranged in different languages. And Bach has given reasons to 2 John Lyons, "Towards a 'notional' theory of the 'parts of speech'," JOURNAL OF LINGUISTICS, 11(1966) 209-236; 211, 223. believe that there is a universal set of transformations which each language draws from in its own way, and he has shown what such transformations might look like in the case of relative clause modification.3 3EmmonBach, "On some recurrent types of transformations," GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY MONOGRAPH NO. 18 ON LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS (1965) 3-18. Discussions on the possibility of a universal base (as distinct from claims about universal constraints on the form of the base component) have mainly been concerned with whether theelements specified in the rules of a universal base--if there is one--are sequential or not. A common assumption is that the universal base specifies the needed syntactic relations, but the assign- ment of sequential order to the constituents of base structures is language specific. Appeals for sequence-free representations 4 of the universal deep structure have been made by Halliday , M. A. K. Halliday, "Some noteson 'deep' grammar," JOURNAL OF LINGUISTICS, II (1966) 55-67. 5 6 Tesniere , and others. Lyons recommends leaving for empirical Lucian Tesniere, ELEMENTS DE SYNTAXE STRUCTURALE, Paris- Klincksieck (1959). 6 Lyons (1966) 227. investigation the question of the relationship between the under- lying representation and sequential order,an Bach7has suggested 'Bach(1965) 13. that continued investigation of the syntactic rules of the world's languages may eventually provide reasons for assuming specific ordering relations in the rules of a universal base. Greenberg's statistical studies ofsequence patterns in selected groups of languages do not, itseems to me, shed any direct light on the issue athand.8 They may be regarded as pro- Joseph Greenberg, "Some universals of grammar,"in J. Greenberg, ed., LANGUAGE UNIVERSALS, MIT Press (1963) 58-90. viding data which, when accompanied byan understanding of the nature of syntactic processes in the specific languages,may even- tually lend comfort tosome proposal other on either the sequential properties ofthe base component or the universal constraints whichgovern the surface ordering of syntactically crganized objects. Findings whichmay be interpreted as suggestinganswers to our third questionare found in the 'markedness' studies of Greenberg9 and in the so-called 'implicationaluniversals' of 9 Joseph Greenberg,"Language universals," in T. A.Sebeok, ed., CURRENT TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS, 111 III, Mouton (1966) 61-112. 10 Jakobson. If such studiescan be interpreted as making empirical 10 Roman Jakobson, "Typologicalstudies and their contributionto historical comparative linguistics,"in E. Sivertsen, ed., PROCEEDINGS OF THE VIIITHINTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF LINGUISTS, Oslo University Press (1958)17-25. assertions about the mappingof deep structures intosurface struc- tures, they may point touniversal constraints of thefollowing form: While the grammaticalfeature 'dual' is madeuse of in one way or another in all languages, onlythose languages whichhave some overt morpheme indicating 'plural'will have overt morphemes indicating 'dual'. The theory of implicationaluniversals does not need to be interpreted, in otherwords, as a set ofassertions on the character of possibledeep structures in humanlanguages and the ways in which theydiffer from one another. The presentessay is intended as a contributionto the study of formal and substantivesyntactic universals. Questions of linear ordering are left untouched,or at least unresolved, and -5 IOW questions