This book offers a new and compendious account of important verbal patterns in present-day English. Serving as a central source of data, it updates and refines earlier research contributing to the syntactic and semantic description of English. Rudanko establishes an original framework, and systematically analyzes patterns of complementation using the tool of case grammar. The examination of Control, or EQUI, is a common theme and an important problem for transformationalists, and English syntacticians will value Rudanko’s work on infinitive complements.

By analyzing seven concrete models, the author examines each in regard to its logical structure, list of cases, derivational system, and use of covert case roles.

There are few linguistic phenomena that have seduced linguists so skillfully as grammatical case has done. Ever since Panini (4th Century BC), case has claimed a central role in linguistic theory and continues to do so today. However, despite centuries worth of research, case has yet to reveal its most important secrets. This book offers breakthrough explanations for the understanding of case through agent-based experiments in cultural language evolution. The experiments demonstrate that case systems may emerge because they have a selective advantage for communication: they reduce the cognitive effort that listeners need for semantic interpretation, while at the same time limiting the cognitive resources required for doing so.

The case grammar model is essentially a description of predicates and the arguments required by the meaning of those predicates in the semantic description of sentences. By probing into semantic structures, case systems can relate one surface structure to many semantic structures and one semantic structure to many surface structures. It is in the area of explaining paraphrase and ambiguity that the model is able to establish relationships which cannot be established on the basis of syntax alone. Yet these semantic realities have important syntactic correlates and help to reveal regularities not otherwise apparent. This volume contains thirteen papers, published between 1970 and 1978, which trace the development of the case grammar matrix model, its relation to tagmemics, generative semantics, and interpretive semantics, and its application to such areas as the analysis of literature and stylistics -- Page 4 of cover.

This book addresses fundamental issues in linguistic theory, including the relation between formal and cognitive approaches, the autonomy of syntax, the content of universal grammar, and the value of generative and functional approaches to grammar. It focuses on the grammar of case relations, signalled by morphological case, prepositions, and word order. Part I offers a critical history of modern grammars of case, focussing on the last four decades and setting this in the context ofearlier, including ancient, developments. The subjects considered include the evolution of ideas concerning deep structure and semantic and grammatical relations, and arguments for the maintenance of the traditional central position of case in the grammar. In parts II and III Professor Andersonexamines the category of case and central unresolved issues in the grammar of case. The latter include questions relating to the idea of an ontologically-based grammar, particularly the degree to which syntactic categories and relationships are grounded in meaning, and the notion of linguistic creativity. This involves a consideration of the way in which cases may be identified and whether their distribution is determined through semantics. The book sheds new light on the interactions betweenmeaning and grammar and on the structure and development of lexical and grammatical systems. The argument and its far-reaching consequences will be of wide interest to linguists, philosophers and others seeking to understand the workings of language.

Originally published in 1977, On Case Grammar, represents a synthesis of various lines of research, with special regard to the treatment of grammatical relations. Arguments are assessed for and against case grammar, localism, lexical decomposition and relational grammar. The book surveys the important evidence to support the validity of the choice of a case grammar as the most satisfactory of current accounts of the notion of grammatical relations. This evidence is derived from a detailed examination of various processes in English and from a typological comparison of other languages, notably Dyirbal and Basque. The book also looks at the establishment of principled limitation on the set of case relations. Lexical, syntactical, semantic and morphological evidence suggests that the set of cases is in conformity with the predictions of a strong form of the localist hypothesis, which requires that case relations be distinguished in terms of source vs. goal vs. location.