Case marking

Revision as of 09:43, 24 March 2010

Case marking is the process of assigning grammatical case values to dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their heads. Usually a language is said to "have cases" only if nouns change their form (nouns decline) to reflect their case. In the UNL^arium framework, case marking is defined through S-rules in the following format:

<SYNTACTIC ROLE>(<CASE>);

Where:

• <SYNTACTIC ROLE> is the syntactic role (VA, VC, VS, VH, etc) of the case-marked term in relation to the head; and
• <CASE> is the grammatical case to be assigned.

Examples

VS(NOM);

assigns the nominative case (NOM) to the specifier of the verb (VS)

VC(ACC);

assigns the accusative case (ACC) to the complement of the verb (VC)

Observations

Conditional case-marking

Conditional case-marking may be stated by stating the left side of the s-rule and coindexing it to the right side:

• VC(DAT); (unconditional case-marking: assign the dative case (DAT) to the complement of the verb);
• VC(PP):=VC(DAT); (conditional case-marking: assign the dative case (DAT) to the complement of the verb (VC) if it is a PP);
• VC([make];NP):=VC(ACC); (conditional case-marking: assign the accusative case (ACC) to the complement of the verb (VC) whose lemma is "make").

Complex case-marking

A single case-marking rule may contain several case-marking operations:

• VS(NOM)VC(ACC)VA(OBL); (assign the nominative case to the specifier of the verb, the accusative case to the complement of the verb, and the oblique case to the adjunct to the verb)

Case-unmarking

Assigned cases may be deleted through "-", but only in conditional case-marking rules (i.e., when the left side of the rule is stated and coindexed to the right side)

• VC(PP,ACC):=VC(-ACC);

The symbol ^ is used for negation and to control infinite recursion

• VC(^NOM):=VC(NOM); (assign the nominative case to the complement of verb if it does not have the nominative case)