Case role

Case roles, according to the work by Fillmore (1967), are the semantic roles of noun phrases in relation to the syntactic structures that contain these noun phrases. The term case role is most widely used for purely semantic relations, including theta roles and thematic roles, that can be independent of the morpho-syntax. The concept of case roles is related to the larger notion of Case (with a capital letter C) which is defined as a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of semantic or syntactic relationship they bear to their heads. Case traditionally refers to inflectional marking.

The relationships between nouns and their containing structures is one of both syntactic and semantic value. The syntactic positional relationships between forms in sentences varies cross-linguistically and allows grammarians to observe semantic values in these nouns by examining their syntactic values. Using these semantic values gives the base for considering case role in a specific language.

Case theory includes, in addition to its inventory of structural cases, a series of lexical cases that are assigned at deep-structure in conjunction with theta role assignment. In addition to its relation to Case (case based on syntactic structures), these semantic notions of case role are closely related to morphological case as well.

The following list of case roles are frequently distinguished in literature, but are by no means an exhaustive list since there is no consensus on the universal inventory of roles, nor a universal agreement as to the correct assignment of constituents to roles.

1. The sky is blue.
2. The lion is in the cave.
3. The bird ate the worm.

The vase is on the table.
or
Canada Day is on a Tuesday.

Roman Jakobson's work on Case Role in Russian

In his article on the case system of Russian, Roman Jakobson (1958) closely examines case assignment and argues for a feature decomposition of case on the basis of semantic considerations. Jakobson (1958) proposed a 3-feature binary case system for Russian case which includes the following: [±marginal, ±quantifying, ±ascriptive] (where the negative value is considered to be unmarked). The term 'marginal', distinguishes the direct and non-direct cases. Only the [-Marginal] cases may occur in subject and object position. 'Quantifying' indicates the relevance of the extent to which the noun is a participant in the event. 'Ascriptive' puts emphasis on directionality.

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