ABSTRACT

It is commonly observed that languages with morphological case tend to have relatively

free word order and that languages with relatively free word order often have

morphological case. The functional motivation for this correlation is intuitively clear,

of course: by helping encode the grammatical roles of a sentence’s constituents, case

subsumes at least part of the function of word order. This raises important questions about

the nature of the structural information that case carries and about its precise role in the

sentence formation process.