Case Grammars (FILLMORE’s Grammar)

Case Grammars (FILLMORE’s Grammar)

Case grammars use the functional relationships between noun phrases and verbs to conduct the more deeper case of a sentence. Generally in our English sentences, the difference between different forms of a sentence is quite negligible. In early 1970’s Fillmore gave some idea about different cases of a English sentence. He extended the transformational grammars of Chomsky by focusing more on the semantic aspects of view of a sentence. In case grammars a sentence id defined as being composed of a preposition P, a modality constituent M, composed of mood, tense, aspect, negation and so on. Thus we can represent a sentence like

Where P - Set of relationships among verbs and noun phrases i.e. P = (C=Case)

M - Modality constituent

For example consider a sentence “Ram did not eat th e apple”.

The tree representation for a case grammar will identify the words by their modality and case. The cases may be related to the actions performed by the agents, the location and direction of actions. The cases may also be instrumental and objective. For example “Ram cuts the apple by a knife”. Here knife is an instrumental case. In fig 8.5 the modality constituent is the negation part, eat is the verb and Ram, apple are nouns which are under the case C₁ and C₂ respectively. Case frames are provided for verbs to identify allowable cases. They give the relationships which are required and which are optional.