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time when the well-ploughed ground of such issues as abstractness, rule

application, and rule ordering failed to bring much generally acceptable fruit
while new problems of comparable attractiveness were only beginning to
emerge.

REFERENCES
Andersen, H . (1969). A study in diachronic morphophonemics: the Ukrainian prefixes. Language
45· 8o7- 830.
Anderson, J. M. & Jones, C. ( 1974). Three theses concerning phonological representations. JL 10.
1-26.
Anderson, J.M. &Jones, C. (1977). Phonological structure 011d the history ofEnglish. Amsterdam:
North-Holland.
Foley, J. (1977). Foundations of theoretical phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kiparsky, P. & Menn, L. (1 977). On the acquisition of phonology. In Macnamara, J. (ed.),
Language learning and thought. New York: Academic Press. 47-78.

Reviewed by EDMUND GUSSMANN,

(Received 6 June 1980) Institute of English. UMCS Lublin.

John M. Anderson, On case grammar. London: Croom Helm. Atlantic

Highlands, N .J.: Humanities Press, I977· Pp. 3I3.

Case grammar is a central part of the structure of language, dealt with by a

rather amorphous body of modern linguistic scholarship, to which John
Anderson is the most prolific contributor. This is his third book in the area (see
references), making the volume of his writings on it easily exceed those of
Fillmore, who, since his seminal (I 968) article, has declined to become the
guru of a movement. Although the phrase 'Case Grammar', sounding like
'Transformational Grammar', or 'Daughter Dependency Grammar', or
'Stratificational Grammar' suggests a unified body of theory embracing
specific hypotheses, Case Grammar is not, even vaguely, a theory in this sense.
Whereas Transformational Grammar and Stratificational Grammar can be
thought of as alternatives or rivals, there can clearly be no alternative or rival
to Case Grammar. What, since Fillmore (1968), have come to be known as
'case relationships' are as indisputably part of meaning in natural languages as
concepts such as conjunction, disjunction, negation, quantification, etc., to
which logicians have devoted so much effort. But the logicians barely touched
the questions raised by case relationships: this seems to be an area of meaning
where the linguists, for a change, have a head start over the philosophers. The
only claim which Case Grammarians as a group can be said to make is the
undeniably true one that case relationships are important; writers as diverse as
Halliday (I 967-68) and J ackendoff (I 972 ), in that they concur with this claim,
count as Case Grammarians.
Anderson advances a striking and specific hypothesis (with which a
0022-2267/81 /0017-0041Soo.35 © 1981 Cambridge University Press

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majority of other Case Grammarians may well disagree), embedded in the

middle of the book. This is the 'Localist Hypothesis', developed from the
earlier books. Case relations are reducible, Anderson claims, to just two
primitive notions, both associated with the location and movement of objects
in space. These notions are those of'place' and 'source', which may be thought
of, feature-like, as either present or absent in any particular case relation. The
four logically possible combinations of the presence or absence of 'source' and
place' yield Anderson's four case relations, 'absolutive', 'locative', 'ergative',
and 'ablative', as shown below:
(1) (=Anderson's(61),p.116)
abs= case, toe= case, erg= case, abl =case
place source place
source
(Evidently the notion 'case' here is redundant.) These four case relations,
Anderson claims, are the only ones occurring in languages. Illustrating this
proposal, he mentions the Pacific language Colville:
In various languages such a system ... is realized rather transparently in
the markers of case. Consider, for example, the situation in Colville
(Mattina, 1973, § 4.32), which opposes to an unmarked absolutive a
locational in //I//(§ 4.323) and an agent in //t// ($4.324).... In Colville the
ablative marker is //ti//, which patently unites the source marker //t// and
the place marker //I// (117).
In Anderson (1973) a similarly neat example is given from Tibetan. I cannot
help wishing that the case were as transparent in a large range of other
languages, including some on which there is a more extensive literature.
Unfortunately it appears to me that the case for the Localist Hypothesis from
languages such as English is very far from transparent.
The argumentation in the book is in the mode of many generative
grammarians of the late sixties and early seventies, arguing that the
UNDERLYING representation of certain sentences should be of such and such a
form. Mediating between the level of underlying representation and surface
form is the unrestricted apparatus of transformational rules, so that
underlying forms of relatively simple sentences can be quite complex or
abstract. Simple passives, for example, are analysed as underlyingly contain-
ing an embedded sentence, as are other surface simple sentences, like the
professor· bought the book in Sicily, and the secretary has sold the car to the
professor. In these ways the conclusions and the argumentation of this book
are very reminiscent of work done in the heyday of generative semantics.
There is no space in a short review to analyse the merits of this sort of
argumentation in detail, but I cannot find it persuasive, not least because the
ontology of the underlying forms postulated is not made clear. Are the
abstract underlying forms and the transformations which mediate between

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them and the surface forms intended to be psychologically real in some sense?
This problem is particularly tantalizing in Anderson's Case G rammar,
because he asserts that the significance of the case relations is 'ultimately
perceptual', but gives no discussion of the possible perceptual correlates. This
failure to embed the often tortuous grammatical discussion within a wider and
perhaps better understood framework of knowledge, or at least theory,
seriously undermines the impact of the book for me.
It is standardly maintained that one of the goals of a semantic theory of a
language is to account for the entailment relations between sentences, and
much of Anderson's argumentation involves entailment relations between
sentences. For instance, he a rgues that the two tokens of moved in John moved
the stone and the stone moved are different verbs, in the same relationship to
each other as kill and die: one is the 'non-causative congener' of the other. He
acknowledges the 'implicational relationship' between these two sentences,
but does not spell out the exact way in which such entailment relations are
actually captured in the general theory he envisages. The closest Anderson
gets to such a specification is his constraint 'the non-causative variant of an
"ergative" verb has an absolutive subject' (82), but the term 'variant' is too
vague and uninformative. In a theory which addresses itself to the central
matter of accounting for entailment relations, as a semantic theory should,
one needs some rule spelled out such as 'An intransitive sentence with verb X
and subject Y in the absolutive case is entailed by a transitive sentence with
verb X and object Yin the ergative case'. Something like this might do the
trick for sentences with transitive and intransitive move, but if it is the same
implicational relation, as Anderson maintains, that holds in the case of
suppletive pairs like kill/die, we would ideally wish the same rule of entailment
to handle that case also. But just because of the suppletion, the suggested rule
will not do in the kill/die case. This is a quite conscious omission on
Anderson's part, since he is primarily preoccupied with identifying the
underlying case relations which NP's bear to their verbs. But the value of any
particular case analysis will be found largely in the degree to which it provides
a convenient basis for the assignment of entailment relations. To put it
somewhat crudely, the particular case relations that N P's bear to verbs are
pretheoretically less obvious than entailment relations between sentences;
judgments about the identity of case relations are less accessible (if they are
accessible at all) to the native speaker's intuition than judgments of entailment
rela tions between sentences. The success of any theory of case relations must
be measured by seeing how successfully it leads to the correct predictions
about entailment relations. And the success of a theory is more visible the
more clearly spelled out are the mechanisms connecting the theoretical
apparatus to the basic predictions. Quite possibly many of Anderson's
conclusions could be justified in this way, but the supplying of the necessary
links is not a trivial process that can be left to a reader: greater explicitness in
this area would have considerably enhanced the value of the book.
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Another example of the failing just noted occurs in the discussion of the
'holistic/partitive' distinction involved in such sentence pairs as bees are
swarming in the garden (partitive) vs the garden is swarming with bees (holistic).
Anderson, and other grammarians who have discussed these sentences, and
with whom he takes issue, concern themselves with finding underlying
representations for these sentences which are distinct in an appropriate way.
Anderson's proposal is that in the holistic sentence garden bears two case
relations, locative and absolutive, to the verb, whereas in the partitive sentence
garden bears only the locative relation to the verb. But this 'solution' really
doesn't get down to the main problem, which is one of how the holistic
sentence entails sentences such as the garden is full ofbees and there are bees all
over the garden, while the partitive does not. In other words, what is the
mechanism connecting the essentially quantificational notion 'holistic inter-
pretation' with the presence of an extra absolutive case relation? The
connection is not spelled out, and it needs to be.
I take the main argument of the book to be for the analysis of case relations
into a universal set of just four, each analysable in terms of the presence or
absence of just two features, as shown above in (I). But a question
immediately arises as to what is being claimed here, since Anderson's theory
also allows a single NP to bear more than one case relation to its verb. For
example, the holistic/partitive ambiguity of smear seen (by some speakers) in
John smeared the wall with paint vs. John smearedpaint on the wall is dealt with
by saying that in the former wall is both locative and absolutive, whereas in the
latter wall is only locative. Clearly it cannot be meant that the case relations
locative and absolutive are nothing more than bundles of the primitive
features 'source' and place' as in (I), because in that case the addition of
absolutive to an NP that is already locative would add nothing in terms of
these features. Put simply, how does the mechanism for combining case
relations in one NP work in terms of the primitive features 'source' and 'place',
to which Anderson seems to claim at the centre of his book that the case
relations can be reduced? One cannot make complete sense of the book's
proposals unless this matter is explained, which it isn't.
I get the impression from this book that it was sent to the publishers
prematurely. It reflects a great deal of concentrated thought about the nature
of case relations: most of the criticisms in the first chapter of the Chomskyan
notion of deep structure are quite telling; and the degree of scholarly erudition
is very impressive. The book argues individual points well, but does not shake
all the individual arguments down together into a solid edifice whose point can
be easily grasped. I am about to become a neighbour of John Anderson's, and
I hope that over the cold winter evenings he will be able to make me see all that
I have missed in this book.
REFERENCES
Anderson, J.M. (1971). The grammar of case: towards a localistic theory. London & New York:
Cambridge University Press.

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Anderson, J. M. (1973). An essay concerning aspect: some considerations of a general character

arising from the Abbe Darrigol's analysis of the Basque verb. The Hague: Mouton.
Fillmore, C . J. (1968). The caseforcase. E. Bach & Harms, R. (eds), Universals in linguistic theory.
New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 1- 88.
+
Halliday, M.A. K. (1967- 78). Notes on transitivity and theme. JL). 37-81, 199-244; 179-215.
Jackendoff, R. S. (1972). Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press.
Mattina, A. (1973). Colville grammatical structure. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hawaii.
(University of Hawaii Working Papers in Linguistics s, +)

Reviewed by JAMES R. HUk.FORD,

(Received 10 November 1C}8o) University of Edinburgh.