Case role

Case roles, according to the work by Charles J. Fillmore (1967),[1] are the semantic roles of noun phrases (NP) in relation to the syntactic structures that contain these noun phrases. The term case role is most widely used for purely semantic relations, including theta roles and thematic roles, that can be independent of the morpho-syntax. The concept of case roles is related to the larger notion of Case (with a capitalised C), which is defined as a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of semantic or syntactic relationship they bear to their heads. Case traditionally refers to inflectional marking.[2]

The relationships between nouns and their containing structures are of both syntactic and semantic value. The syntactic positional relationships between forms in sentences vary cross-linguistically and allows grammarians to observe semantic values in these nouns by examining their syntactic values. Using these semantic values gives the base for considering case roles in a specific language.[1]

In addition to its inventory of structural cases, case theory includes a series of lexical cases that are assigned at deep structure in conjunction with theta role assignment.[3] In addition to its relation to Case (case based on syntactic structures), these semantic notions of case role are also closely related to morphological case.[1]

  1. ^ a b c Fillmore, Charles J. (April 1967). "The case for case". Proceedings of the Texas Symposium, on Language Universals.
  2. ^ Blake, Barry J. (2001). Case. Port Chester, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780511154249.
  3. ^ Woolford, Ellen (1997). "Four-way case systems: Ergative, nominative, objective and accusative". Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. 15 (1): 181–227. doi:10.1023/A:1005796113097. S2CID 169330717.