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Fillmore Case Grammar:

 Fillmore Grammar is also called as case grammar. Case grammar provides a different approach to
the problem of how syntactic and semantic interpolation can be combined. Grammar rules are
written to describe syntactic rather than semantic regularities. But the structures, rules that are
produced correspond to semantic relations rather than to strictly syntactic ones.

 Case grammar describes the relationships between verbs and their arguments parsing using case
grammar is usually expectation-driven. once the verb of the sentence is located, it can be used to
predict the noun phrases that will occur and to determine the relationship of those phrases to the
rest of the sentences.
 A case grammar describes the correct set of deep cases.

Characteristics of Fillmore Case Grammar:

i. Agent: Investigation of the action.

ii. Instrument: Cause of the event.
iii. Dative: Entity affected by the action.
iv. Factitive: Object.
v. Locative: Place of the event.
vi. Source: Place from which something moves.

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

S M+P

 Where P - Set of relationships among verbs and noun

phrases i.e. P = (C=Case)
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 M - Modality constituent includes such as modularities, on the sentence as a whole as negation,

tense, mood and aspect.

 For example consider a sentence “Ram did not eat the 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.