ABSTRACT
Case grammar was developed in the late 1960s by Charles Fillmore (1966, 1968, 1969, 1971a, 1971b), who saw it as a ‘substantive modification to the theory of transformational grammar’ (Fillmore, 1968, p. 21), as represented by, for instance, Chomsky (1965). The latter model was unable to account for the functions of clause items as well as for their categories; it did not show, for instance, that expressions like in the room, towards the moon, on the next day, in a careless way, with a sharp knife, and by my brother, which are of the category prepositional phrase, simultaneously indicate the functions, location, direction, time, manner, instrument, and agent respectively. Fillmore suggested that this problem would be solved if the underlying syntactic structure of prepositional phrases were analysed as a sequence of a noun phrase and an associated prepositional case-marker, both dominated by a case symbol indicating the thematic role of that prepositional phrase (Newmeyer, 1986, p. 103), and that, in fact, every element of a clause which has a thematic role to play should be analysed in terms of case markers and case symbols.
