[Lexicog] Fillmore's Case Grammar

[Rudolph Troike]

Walter Cook published a significant book on case grammar with Georgetown
University Press in 1989, which includes a listing of case frames with verbs,
and a listing of verbs with case frames. He published a later book with SIL
which I haven't looked at in detail, but am thinking of using as a text for
my class in Advanced Grammatical Analysis this Fall. Some of our SILers can
undoubtedly supply the title.

A bit of history: Chomsky adopted "theta roles" without ever mentioning
Fillmore, since Fillmore was part of the rebel uprising against Chomsky by
some of his former students in 1968, and the rebels were thereafter cast
into bibliographical darkness by Chomsky, who proceeded to incorporate some
of their observations in his subsequent work, without reference.

Linguistics, like other sciences, particularly social sciences, is greatly
influenced by fads, and when a fad passes, it is thrown out like the baby
with the bath water, and students are by implication guided to shun the
work lest they be infected by it. When I was growing up in linguistics, the
structuralists were denouncing all of their predecessors, and it was not
recommended to read people like Jespersen, unless to find fault for lack of
scientific rigor. One of the worst insults that could be leveled was to
call a linguist a "philologist", and Jespersen was certainly that.

Later, Jespersen was rehabilitated when the next generation of students,
for whom "structuralist" (or worse, "anthropological linguist", which was
equated with "butterfly collector") was a term of disparagement, did not
know that he was anathema, and discovered some amazing insights, still being
pursued. Whereas I had cut my linguistic teeth on Gleason and Trager and
Smith, a mere decade later, in the mid-1960's, a linguistics PhD student
could be heard to ask her peers as she was preparing for her comps, "Who
is Trager N. Smith?" (one of my all-time favorite quotations). [NB: Trager
& Smith's transcription scheme for English vowels still makes the most
sense as a basis for comparing regional varieties, and understanding the
Great Vowel Shift, but it was buried under the Vesuvian ashes of SPE
(The Sound Pattern of English, by Chomsky & Halle), now itself lost beneath
the lava flows of Optimality Theory. Old wine constantly being re-poured
into new bottles...]

Fillmore's Case Grammar proposal, which I heard him deliver, instantly
made sense for me for the first time, after having puzzled over the fact
that one could often algorithmically translate between English prepositions
and Turkish and Quechua case suffixes, for which there was simply no
explanatory foundation in linguistics at that time. [I directed the first
machine translation project to translate from English to Turkish, at that
time the only MT project outside the Soviet Union attempting to translate
FROM English, so these questions constantly came to the fore, and they
later recurred when I worked on a textbook for Bolivian Quechua.] Fillmore's
ideas energized many SILers working around the world, as Mike has noted,
and produced a lot of valuable results. However, unlike Chomsky, Fillmore
did not proceed to try to lead his own revolution, and rather modestly
ducked the opportunity. When for no clear reason people began demanding
that either he come up with a final definitive list of semantic roles or
give up the whole enterprise, he more or less acquiesced (as Mike has
noted, no one has demanded the same for Chomsky's GB or MP), and Case
Grammar ceased to be the fad of the day and was tossed into the dustbin of
linguistic history, along with Generative Semantics (both of which keep
being revived but with strong disclaimers of any connection to the
originals).

Chomsky incorporated semantic roles under the label "Theta Roles", and
"Theta Theory" became an essential part of the Government and Binding
model, but it was, and remains, merely a convenient structural appendage,
with no attention to the actual semantic content. Chomsky, despite having
vanquished the Structuralists, remains a structuralist to the core, and
has no real interest in semantic or lexical matters, despite the fact
that his Minimalist Program is touted as a "lexicalist" model. Theta
roles are simply mechanically manipulated parts of a structural system.
In fact, Chomsky even out-structuralizes the structuralists, for he
defines language as a "formal [i.e., mathematical] object".

Semantic roles/cases remain a valuable heuristic for making sense of
cross-linguistic similarities and linguistic change. One cannot simply
dismiss the fact that there is a great deal of algorithmic equivalence
between prepositions, case suffixes, and postpositions in many different
and unrelated languages in all parts of the world. It remains a significant
empirical question as to how many there are, and precisely how they should
be characterized, but ignoring their existence because they are "old hat"
or dismissing the work of those who utilize these categories for the same
reason, does not advance our understanding of language as a universal
human phenomenon. At the other extreme, neither does a cookie-cutter
approach to the application of case/role labels. (Mike's illustration of
"adjective" is appropriate here -- Chomsky defined Adjective as one of
his set of universal lexical categories, but there is no reason to
identify such a category in Korean apart from Stative Verbs; however, we
don't throw out the notion of parts of speech just because no one can
come up with an exhaustively finite list of possible parts of speech --
the concept remains a good working premise for all linguistic work,
including lexicography.)

Nor should we be dismayed and give up the enterprise when closer scrutiny
shows things to be more complex than we had imagined on initial inquiry.
Several years ago I directed a whole dissertation on uses of two locative/
directional case markers/postpositions in Japanese, NI and DE. At the
outset, I was dubious that such a narrowly focused topic was adequate for
a dissertation, but it proved to be more than sufficient.

        Rudy Troike




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