Case Systems for Natural Language

Abstract In many languages (e.g. Latin, Greek, Russian, Turkish, German) the relationship of a noun phrase to the rest of a sentence is indicated by altered forms of the noun. The possible relationships are called (surface) “cases”. Because (1) it is difficult to specify semantic-free selection rules for the cases, and (2) related phenomena based on prepositions or word order appear in apparently case-less languages, many have argued that studies of cases should focus on meaning, i.e. on “deep cases”. Deep cases bear a close relationship to the modifiers of a concept. In fact, one could consider a deep case to be a special, or distinguishing, modifier. Several criteria for recognizing deep cases are considered here in the context of the problem of describing an event. Unfortunately, none of the criteria serves as a completely adequate decision procedure. A notion based on the context-dependent “importance” of a relation appears as useful as any rule for selecting deep cases. A representative sample of proposed case systems is examined. Issues such as surface versus deep versus conceptual levels of cases, and the efficiency of the representations implicit in a case system are also discussed.

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