Page 369 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Unit 28: Transformational Generative Grammar

constituent is a tenseless set of relationships involving verb and nouns and the modality constituent Notes
includes such modalities on the sentences as whole as negation, tense, mood, and aspect. The deep
relation in the following sentences remains the same irrespective of the position of these nouns related
to the verb ‘break’ :
(a) Thomas broke the door.
(b) The door was broken by Thomas.
(c) The hammer broke the door.
(d) Thomas broke the door with the hammer.
In (a) the subject position is occupied by the agent, in (b) by the goal and in (c) by the instrument.
These meaning relations—agentive, goal, instrumental, etc.—are what Fillmore calls deep case
relations. These case relations include such concepts as Agentive, Instrumental, Objective, Factitive,
Locative, Benefactive, Experiencer, Goal, Source, etc. The external manifestations of case relations
are language-specific. Verbs are selected according to the case environments or ‘case frames’ provided
by the sentence. For example, the verb break can occur in following environments :
[-o] The door broke.
[-o+A] Thomas broke the door.
[-o+l] The hammer broke the door.
[-o+1+A] Thomas broke the door with a hammer.
The total frame feature for break may be represented as
+[-O (l) (A)]
If there is an A (agentive), it becomes the subject; otherwise, if there is an I (instrumental), it becomes
the subject; or else the subject is the O (objective). Where there is only one case category, its NP must
serve as the surface subject. If neither agent nor instrument nor objective is expressed, then patient/
locative must become the subject. Consider, for example, the following sentences and their case
relations.
1. Objective The door (O) broke
2. Agentive(+Objective) Thomas (A) broke the door (O).
3. Instrumental (+Objective) The hammer (I) broke the door (O).
4. Objective+Instrumental+Agentive The door (O) was broken with the hammer (I)
by Thomas (A).
5. Locative Hardwar (L) is windy.
6. Locative It is windy in Hardwar (L).
7. Dative (Agentive+Objective +Dative) Thomas (A) / gave a book (O) / to his sister (D).
Verbs with similar meaning require different cases. Kill may have an agentive or an instrumental or
both. (The boy killed the thief. The gun killed the thief. The boy killed the thief with a gun), but
murder always has an agentive since we do not say The gun murder the thief though it can occur
with both agentive and instrumental (The thief was murdered by the boy with a gun).
‘Some of the mechanisms used by languages to externalize case relations are : inflexion, superlation
preposition/prepositional particles, word-order, or any combination of these. Human languages are
universally possessed with such cases. These role types, according to Fillmore, can be identified with
certain quite elementary judgments about the things that go on around us; judgments about who
does something, who experiences something, where something happens, what it is that changes,
what it is that moves, where it starts out, and where it ends up.’ The following table gives us an idea
of the correlation of ‘roles’ with prepositions in English.
Role Preposition
Agent by
Patient of, to

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