| The Fundamentals of Case Grammar: |
| Part 2 |
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| Dr. JCS: |
As we've already learned, Case Notions are the grammatical
mappings that accrue to nouns when they're used in sentences.
Both Russian and English use prepositions (English more than Russian), both use word order (English, again, more than Russian), but other than in pronouns, where English still preserves certain case-conditioned changes of form (e.g., he, his, him), only Russian uses affixes (surface case endings) to indicate Deep Case relationships. But let's talk about nouns themselves. What do nouns do? They name "persons," "places" and "things," and - if you went to a private school - "ideas:" soldier, city, bottle, liberty. In order to use nouns to make a sentence, we must determine their relationship to the predicativizer - usually a verb. When nouns occur in the context of a verb, the "things" they name automatically acquire additional meaning - something we call Case Notions, depending on the Case Frames of that verb. The six "cases" of Russian grammar participate in the Surface Structure of the language. Case Notions, the Universal Deep Cases of all languages, are not these "cases." |
| RLM: | Okay. Do let us go on! |
| Dr. JCS: | As I was saying, once nouns occur in the context of a
verb, the "things" they name take on an additional meaning:
On the Surface Structure level of English, the italicized forms - boy, snake, stick - variously serve as subjects of the previous sentences. However, on the Deep Structure level, the nouns boy, snake, stick carry different - and yet, consistent - Case Notions in relation to the verb "to strike:"
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| RLM: | We've obviously reached the goal of our journey. |
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Dr. JCS: |
We have reached the goal, and yet we needed to travel through
all the previous stages to get to what follows. |
| Part 2 |
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