The Case of Government and Binding Theory

This chapter is meant to serve as an overview to the notion of case within modern theoretical linguistics. In this description several issues must be dealt with in order to give a general idea about what case is. Another question is what historically motivated assumptions have served to form our present day notion of case. This chapter is written basically from the syntactic point of view, so it mentions the Government and Binding Theory, however, it also concerns the semantic and morphological issues as well. This chapter is organized as follows. First in this section I discuss in brief the history of case, then I try to clarify what case really means, after that it gives examples from Latin and Hungarian, which both have a freedom in word order. In the other chapters we examine the architecture of GB, which is followed by the most relevant chapter, which describes Chomsky’s Case Theory and in the last section I will consider some open-ended questions where different problems of case may arise. Let us fist see a short history of case developing system. (General Introduction)egyetemiangol nyelv és irodalo