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.