Case and grammatical relations: Studies in honor of Bernard Comrie (review)

The book under review is a collection of twelve papers in honor of Bernard Comrie.¹ Though the genre of a festschrift does not impose rigid thematic restrictions, especially when the festschriftee is a scholar who has contributed to as many diverse areas of linguistics as Bernard Comrie has, the title Case and grammatical relations is indeed justified. All of the contributions to the volume (except the one by Maria Polinsky) deal with various issues having to do either with morphological case, or with various properties of grammatical relations, or with both.

The contributions to the volume include studies dealing with individual languages (Russian, Hungarian, Ingush, Swedish dialects, Central Pomo, Malagasy) or with groups of genetically or geographically related languages (North-West Caucasian and Kartvelian, Bodic, Kiranti, Germanic and Romance), as well as wide-scope typological studies. Most of the papers are, in addition to being empirically grounded, also theory-oriented, aiming at elucidating some analytical, methodological, or terminological issues against the particular material, or bringing forth new approaches to the data. A broadly understood functional-typological approach is the framework the contributors adhere to, though not all of them state this explicitly; this does not mean, of course, that the volume shows absolute theoretical unity.

The volume opens with a brief preface (vii-ix) by the editors, stating the goals of the book and giving useful short summaries of the individual chapters. Though the editors decided not to divide the volume into several thematic sections, the organization of the book follows a certain pattern.

The first two papers deal specifically with morphological case, and contain both discussions of interesting (though not previously unknown) data and important theoretical and methodological conclusions. GREVILLE G. CORBETT, in 'Determining morphosyntactic feature values: The case for case' (1-34), extends his 'canonical' approach to typology (see e.g. Corbett 2005) to the category of case, and illustrates it with data from Russian, whose case system includes both more canonical and less canonical case values. Since the canonical approach is relatively well known, I do not think it is necessary to give an outline of it here. With respect to case, it allows one to formulate a whole array of morphological, syntactic, and semantic criteria defining the range along which cases (and, indeed, almost any reasonable morphosyntactic features and their values) can vary. The second part of the paper, which discusses the problematic case values in Russian (the vocative, the so-called 'second genitive' and 'second locative', the adnumerative, and the 'inclusive', the latter usually not analyzed as a separate case value), is particularly interesting, especially for those linguists who are not well acquainted with Russian data. The canonical approach allows one to give a principled and explicit account of the important differences between the 'central' and the 'peripheral' cases in Russian, and can, moreover, be useful for typological comparison. Finally, it must be acknowledged that Corbett does full justice to the literature on case published in Russian, even to the lesser-known papers.

Andrew Spencer, in 'Does Hungarian have a case system?' (35-56), analyzes the morphosyntax of what has been traditionally considered 'case' in Hungarian and argues that in this language it is not necessary to posit a morphosyntactic feature 'case' at all. Spencer bases his argument on the assumption that in order to justify a genuine case system in a given language, the following two questions (the so-called 'Beard's criterion', Beard 1995, Spencer & Otoguro 2005) must be answered: (i) 'is there a need for a [Case] attribute in morphology to capture generalizations purely about forms?', and (ii) 'is there a need for a [Case] attribute in the syntax to capture generalizations about the parallel distributions of sets of distinct forms?' (37). Thus, in languages like Russian-where case values are not expressed by dedicated morphemes, being fused with number and (in adjectives) gender, which is further...