Lesson for “Case Grammar In English ”
Charles Fillmore has suggested a modification to the theory of transformational grammar.
His argument is that deep structures show role relationships rather than syntactic relationships and that nominal expression are put into syntactic relationship by transformational rules. According to Fillmore the sentences in its basic structures are consists of a verb and one or more noun phrases. Each of these noun phrases associated with the verb in a particular case relationship. In the case grammar, the base components have two constituents—– a ‘propositional’ constituent and a modality constituent.
The prepositional constituent is a tense less set of relationships involving verb and nouns and the modality constituent includes such modalities on the sentences as a whole as negation, tense, mood, and aspect. The deep relation between ‘broke’ and the nouns—‘the door’, ‘the hammer’, and ‘Ali’—in the following sentence remains the same irrespective of the position of these nouns relative to the verb ‘break’:
a) Ali broke the door.
b) The door was broken by Ali.
c) The hammer broke the door.
d) Ali broke the door with the hammer.
In (a) the subject position is occupied by the agent, in (b) the goal and in (c) by the instrument. These meaning relations –agentive, goal, instrumental; are what Fillmore calls deep case relations. These case relations include such concepts as Agentive, instrumental, Objective, Factitive, Locative, Benefactive, Experiencer, Goal, and Source. The external manifestations of case relations are language-specific.
Verbs are selected according to the case environments or ‘case frames’ provided by the sentence. For example, the verb break can occur in the following environments:
[-O] The door broke.
[-O +A] Ali broke the door.
[-O + I] The hammer broke the door.
[- O + I + A] Ali broke the door with the hammer.
The total frame feature for break may be represented as + [-O (I) (A)]
If there is an A (agentive), it becomes the subject; otherwise, if there is, an I (instrumental), it becomes the subject; or else the subject is the O (objective). Where there is only one case category, its NP must serve as the surface subject. It neither agent nor instrument nor objective is expressed, and then patient/locative must become the subject. Consider, for example, the following sentences and their case relations;
1.Objective The door (O) broke.
2.Agentive (+Objective) Ali (A) broke the door (O).
3.Instrumental (+Objective) the hammer (I) broke the door (O).
4.Objective + Instrumental the door (O) was broken with the hammer (I)
by Ali (A).
5.Locative Hardwar (L) is windy.
6.Locative it is windy in Hardwar (L)
7.Dative (agentive + Objective + Dative) (O0 to his sister (D).
Verb with similar meaning require different cases; Such as verb ‘kill’ may have an agentive or an instrumental or both; for example, (The boy killed the thief. The gun killed the thief. The boy killed the thieve with a gun), but murder always has an agentive since we don’t say (The gun murder the thief) though it can occur with both agentive and instrumental (The thief was murdered by the boy with a gun)
