Case Theories

theory	authors	num- ber of cases	names of cases
Case grammar	Ch. Fillmore	6	The Agentive Case, The Instrumental case, The Dative Case, The Factitive Case, The Locative Case, The Objective case
The theory of positional cases	J.C. Nesfield, M. Bryant M. Deutschbein	5	The Genitive, The Nominative, The Vocative, The Dative, The Accusative
The substitutional theory		3	The Nominative, The Objective case, The Genitive
The limited case theory	H. Sweet, O. Jespersen	2	The Genitive, The Common
The theory of prepositional cases	G. Curme	2	The Genitive (to + N, for + N) The Dative (of + N)
The postpositional theory	G.N. Vorontsova	0	__

Ch. Fillmore introduced syntactic-semantic classification of cases. They show relations in the so-called deep structure of the sentence. According to him, verbs may stand to different relations to nouns. There are six cases:

Agentive Case (A) John opened the door; Instrumental Case (I) The key opened the door; John used the key to open the door; Dative Case (D) John believed that he would win (the case of the animate being affected by the state of action identified by the verb); Factitive Case (F) The key was damaged ( the result of the action or state identified by the verb); Locative Case (L) Chicago is windy; Objective case (O) John stole the book.

According to the “theory of positional cases” the unchangeable forms of the noun are differentiated as different cases by virtue of the functional positions occupied by the noun in the sentence. Thus, the English noun distinguishes the inflectional genitive case and four non-inflectional, purely positional, cases:

Nominative Case John opened the door; Vocative Case John, open the door; Dative Case Give John this book; Accusative Case I went with John there, Genitive Case This is John’s book.

According to the “substitutional case theory” there are three cases:

Nominative Case John opened the door; Genitive Case This is John’s book; Objective Case (due to the existence of objective pronouns me, him, whom) Give John this book.

The “theory of prepositional cases” regards nounal combinations with the prepositions in certain object and attributive collocations as morphological case forms:

Dative Case Give this book to John; Genitive Case She is a friend of my mother.

The “limited case theory” recognizes the existence in English of a limited case system:

Genitive Case This is John’s book; Common Case Give John this book.

The limited case theory differentiates the two case forms: the possessive or genitive form as the strong member of the categorial opposition and the common, or “non-genitive” form as the weak member of the categorial opposition. This theory is at present most broadly accepted among linguists both in this country and abroad.

Another view of the problem of the English noun cases has been put forward which sharply counters the theories observed. The “postpositional theory” claims that the English noun in the course of its historical development has completely lost the morphological category of case. Thus, this theory states that there are no cases at all. The form ’s is optional because the same relations may be expressed by the ‘of-phrase’: the doctor’s arrival – the arrival of the doctor. So the lingual unit that is named the “genitive case” is a combination of a noun with a postposition.

In modern linguistics the term “genitive case” is often used instead of the “possessive case” because the meanings rendered by the “’s ” sign are not only those of possession (Fig. 36).

Fig. 36