Grammatical Cases

WHO IS CHARLES J. FILLMORE?

Charles J. Fillmore (born 1929) is an American linguist, and an Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

 Dr. Fillmore has been extremely influential in the areas of syntax and lexical semantics. He was a proponent of Noam Chomsky's theory of generative grammar during its earliest transformational grammar phase. He was one of the founders of cognitive linguistics, and developed the theories of Case Grammar (Fillmore 1968), and Frame Semantics (1976).

He was one of the first linguists to introduce a representation of linguistic knowledge that blurred this strong distinction between syntactic and semantic knowledge of a language. He introduced what was termed case structure grammar and this representation subsequently had considerable influence on psychologists as well as computational linguists.

Grammar Case is a system of linguistic analysis, focusing on the link between the valence, or number of subjects, objects, etc., of a verb and the grammatical context it requires.

The system was created by the American linguist Charles J. Fillmore in (1968), in the context of Transformational Grammar. This theory analyzes the surface syntactic structure of sentences by studying the combination of deep cases (i.e. semantic roles) -- Agent, Object, Benefactor, Location or Instrument -- which are required by a specific verb.

For instance, the verb "give" in English requires an Agent (A) and Object (O), and a Beneficiary (B); e.g. "Jones (A) gave money (O) to the school (B).

According to Fillmore, each verb selects a certain number of deep cases which form its case frame. Thus, a case frame describes important aspects of semantic valency, of verbs, adjectives and nouns.
Case frames are subject to certain constraints, such as that a deep case can occur only once per sentence.

Some of the cases are obligatory and others are optional. Obligatory cases may not be deleted, at the risk of producing ungrammatical sentences.

A fundamental hypothesis of case grammar is that grammatical functions, such as subject or object, are determined by the deep, semantic valence of the verb, which finds its syntactic correlate in such grammatical categories as Subject and Object, and in grammatical cases such as Nominative, Accusative, etc.

Fillmore puts forwards the following hierarchy for a universal subject selection rule:

Agent < Instrumental < Objective

That means that if the case frame of a verb contains an agent, this one is realized as the subject of an active sentence.

Case grammar is an attempt to establish a semantic grammar. (Most grammars by linguists take syntax as the starting-point).

Using a modified form of valency theory Fillmore suggests that the verb establishes a set of cases in a sentence: these are like slots, which usually need not all be filled. For example, consider these sentences:

1. Mary opened the door with a key.

2. Mary opened the door.

3. A key opened the door.

4. The door opened.

In (1) the semantic cases are: Mary - agent; the door - object; a key - instrument.

In (2) they are as in (1), except that there is no instrument.

In (3) the cases are: a key - instrument; the door - object.

In (4) the only case is the door - object.

In other words, to open requires at the minimum that the object be specified in a sentence.