OSMANIA. PAPERS ... IN LINGUISTICS Volume 7, g 1981-82 DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS OSMANIA UNIVERSITY ' HYDERARAD-500 007 (A. P.) INDIA . t' GOMMITTEE ON PUBLICATIONS Bh. KRISHNAMURTI H. S. ANANTHANARAYANA C. RAMARAO B. LAKSHMI BAI B. RAI\IAKHISHN A REDDY Editors B. LAKSHMI BAI B. RAMAKRISHNA REDDY O.smania Papers in Linguistics (OPiL) is an annual journal fer publishing research articles by the staff, students and visiting faculty of the Department of Linguistics, Osmania University. Articles may occasionally be invited from scholars outside Osmania on special topics. Articles will be in English. The views expressed in OPiL are exclusively those of the authors. This publication is supported by funds from the University Grants Commission and is supplied to institutions, societies and DPpartments of Linguistics in exchange for ~imilar publications. Individuals may order copies from the Editor at a nominal price of Rs. 10.00 or S 2.00 each (excluding postage.) All matters rela~ing to payments, exchange, and change of addre;-:;s should be addressed to the Editor, OPiL, Depart­ ment of Linguistics. Osmania University. Hyderabad-500 007, India. OPiL 7, 8. 1-21 (1981-82) CASE RELATIONS, PERSPECTIVE, AND PATIENT CEKTRALITYl STANLEY STAROSTA Department of Linguistics, University of Hawaii 1 . 0. INTRODUCTION The lexicase grammatical framework came into existence at the University of Hawaii in 1970. As indicated by its name, it is a lexicalist approach to case grammar. Not indicated by the name is the fact that it is 1ocalist in its approach to case, de­ pendency in its orientation to syntax, conservative in respect to the question of grammatical power (and thus adamant in its rejection of transformations as legitimate descriptive devices), and fanatic in its adherence to the requirements of formality and explicitness which constitute the defining eharacteristics of generative grammar. (See Starosta 1979b for an exhaustive listing of the papers and dissertations written in this framework to that date.) As a version of case grammar, lexicase recognizes that part of the speaker's knowledge of the grammatical properties of the sentences in his or her language includes a set of semantically contentful case relations which obtain between the head of a construction (the head N of a noun phrase as well as the head V of a sentence) and its nominal attributes. As a consequence, the model assumes that it is not enough to mark a verb (or noun) for the purely categorial environment in which it is allowed to occur, as was done in Chomskyan 'standard theory' transformational grammar, e.g. (1) put { +V +NP,......._PP} In addition to this kind of categorial environment feature (and ultimately instead of it), verbs (and nouns as well) must be provided with an environtment stated in terms of case relations. I .. This. pap_er is based on lectures given at Chula1ongkorn University, Osrnama Unrvers1ty, and the Central Institute of Indian LaPguage~. 2 STANLEY STAROSTA Fillmore's approach to case grammar represented case re­ lations as nodes in a tree and the environment for the lexical insertion of a verb such as put was stated in terms of these case relation nodes in the form of a ' case frame', e.g. (2) put { + V +Agent, Object, Location } Although the incorporation of case relations into the syntactic framework was an important and necessary stcp2, the way in which this was done had an important theoretical drawback: it lost the information that all prepositional phrases are cons­ tructions of the same type, and it introduced greater power and indeterminacy into the model, in that it increased the number of possible structural descriptions which could be assigned to a given string of words without providing a relatively non-arbi­ trary means for choosing between them. In the years since the beginning of Fillmorean case grammar in the late sixties, this trend toward increased power continued and accelerated, to the point where later case articles by Fillmore can be shown to share the assumptions and procedures of generative semantics thereby forfeiting any claim to empirical content. 2 . 0. CASE RELATIONS AKD PERSPECTIVE Lexicase is an attempt to retain the insights of case grammar without sliding into the empirical bankruptcy which befell its Fillmorean antecedent. The general strategy employed to this end is a strict adherence to the requirements of formality and explicitness and the ruthless rejection of all redundant power­ consuming machinery (see Starosta l979a). As has been repeatedly pointed out by various cnt1cs of Fillmorean case g·rammar, one of its chief weaknesses is the absence of any relatively objective means of establishing a finite and defensible set of case relations. They just seem to keep coming, and no one seems to know how to decide when enough is enough. The reason for this failing, it seems to me, is the 'silent movie' approach that has always been used in this framework to do case analyses of sentences. In this approach, a set of intuitively be­ lievable situationally defined case relations is assumed a priori. 2. I will notattemptto iustifv thatstatcmenthere. Thishasbeenamply demonstrated in thr cru;e grammar literature, and independent confirmation is nrovided bv the 'functin.,al relations' which ha:ve recently appeared within the Standard Theory tradition and some of its offshoots (cf. Bresnan 1978: 23-35, 49-'Yl, Brame I 978t 25-42). These relations can be seen as a primitive sv•tem of case relations. CASE RELATIONS, PERSPECTIVE, AND PATIENT CEJ\TRALITY 3 To assign case relations to any sentence of any language, then, we simply imagine a silent movie enactment of the event (or state) depicted by the sentence, decide which of the performers satisfies which one of the previously assumed a priori semantic definitions for the case relations, and assign that case relations to the cor­ respuading actant (nominal constituent) in tree sentence accor­ dingly, regardle~s ofthe way in which the actant is gra.mmatically coded, and in fact even regardless of what langmtge the sentence belongs to. If two grammatically distinct sentences correspond to the same silent movie representation, then they are assumed in Fil­ lmorean case grammar to share an underlying representation3, and the corresponding actants in the two sentences will have the same case relation. One of the sentences will then be taken as corresponding more or less directly to an underlying represen­ tation, and the other will be derived from the same representation by a transformational process which is assumed not to alter the original underlying case relations. This principle of analysis could be characterized in terms of the motto, " Once a case rela­ tion, always a case relation." It has the consequence that sen­ tences such as (3) and (4), for example (cf. Fillmore 1971 :49), will have their corresponding actants assigned identical case relations: (3) John hit his cane against the fence. AGT PAT GOAL (4) John hit the fence with his cane. AGT GOAL PAT The surface discrepancies exhibited by the grammatical marking of for example fence are regarded as superficial, and can be re­ conciled by means of transformations, be they ever so distant. As. in the case of generative semantics and similar frameworks, this emphasis on situational ('logical') criteria at the expense of grammatical ones in the establishment of an inventory of case relations not only makes it hard to decide how manv case relations there should be, but also contributes tremendously to the power of the .associated metathcory. A given situation may be enco­ dable m terms of widely differing grammatical structures, and very powerful rules such as 'clause conflation' (Fillmore 1971 :49) are often required to derive both from a single common abstract structure. 3 · . Es,entially the same orocedure is of course also adopted m gcncrative semantl:s and other semantically based grammatical frameworks such as categonal grammar and Montague gr·ammar. 4 STANLEY STAROSTA Those readers who subscribe to the proposition that 'a stronger theory makes a weaker claim' will recognize this added power as a serious metatheoretical problem. To cope with it, lexicase adopts a strategy exactly the opposite of the usual S.O.P. (Sub­ ject, Object, Predicate) in transformational grammar. Instead of assuming with Frege that "grammar is the handmaiden of semantics", it has put the whip in the other hand and placed the primary burden of identifying· case relations on grammatical criteria, correspondingly decreasing the weight of purely situa­ tional evidence. In this paper, I will illustrate this procedure by giving t~e currently hypothesized set of lexicase case relations and presenting some of the grammatical (as opposed to 'logical' - situational) evidence for postulating this particular limited set. The case relations I assume to be needed in a universal grammar are the following: (5) PAT Patient the perceived central parbc1pant in a state or event (obligatory with all verbs; formerly 'Object' or ' Theme') AGT Agent the perceived external instigator or initiator of an event or state INS Instrument the perceived immediate instigator of an event or state LOC Locus the perceived location, source, or goal of the Patient (formerly 'inner Locative') PLC Place the perceived abstract or concrete spatial setting of the action or state (formerly 'outer Locative') COR Correspondent the entity perceived as being in cor­ respondence with the Patient (formerly 'Dative ' or 'Experiencer ') REF Reference the perceived external frame of re­ ference or standard for the state or action (formerly 'Benefactive') MNS Means the abstract path by way of which an external influence impinges on the situa­ tion (formerly 'Manner') CASE RELATIONS, PERSPECTIVE, AND PATIENT CENTRALITY 5 NCR Increment the extent to which a Patient is affected by an external influence TIM Time the temporal setting of a state or event The semantic definitions given after each CR are secondary rather than criteria!.