A Grammar of *Case: The Head of a Semantic Filler, but a Nominative Morpheme

185 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2000.The dissertation proposes an explicit and general analysis of case, which is extendable to the analyses of the syntax and semantics of the topic morpheme, and the "topic-like" nominative morpheme in Japanese. A case phrase, e.g., a nominative phrase, in general is analyzed as adjoining to a predicate and specifying a particularly case-registered argument of the predicate as identical to its complement. New data concerning coordination among case phrases or topic phrases are offered in order to argue for the grammar of case and against the standard theory of case (that case phrases are subcategorized for by predicates and topic phrases are adjuncts). In the theory of case, semantics takes care of associations between nouns and arguments, for example, eliminating a valence specification if its content is specified as an argument. The theory of case is implemented on parsing system unicorn3, which had been developed at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD