Form and Meaning in Language, vol. 1: Papers on Semantic Roles (review)

This volume consists of seven papers originally published between 1968 and 1978 that deal with the relationships among syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Each is presented with brief introductory reflections by Fillmore; an even shorter preface introduces the volume as a whole. F’s extraordinary sensitivity to nuances of linguistic expression make these papers a pleasure to reread, both in content and presentation. While many of his ideas have attained the status of common knowledge, these papers also contain many insightful observations that had been forgotten (at least by this reviewer).

Reading the papers—particularly the earliest ones—brings home the transience of grammatical theories. What F has to say about the formal machinery of grammar is of primarily historical interest. But these papers are rich in examples and informally stated generalizations, which remain relevant to current research. Thus, republishing these papers was worthwhile.

The papers in the volume are divided into two groups, with a gap of five years separating their publication dates. ‘Toward a modern theory of case’ (1969), ‘The case for case’ (1968), ‘The grammar of hitting and breaking’ (1970), and ‘Types of lexical information’ (1969) are all primarily concerned with what is now called linking theory, that is, the complex mapping between thematic roles (like agent or instrument) and syntactic structure (including word order, morphological case, agreement, and adpositions). The later papers, ‘The case for case reopened’ (1977), ‘Topics in lexical semantics’ (1977), and ‘On the organization of semantic information in the lexicon’ (1978) address a wider range of issues on the syntax/semantics interface. They make a case for the heterogeneity of linguistic meaning, illustrating in various ways how pragmatics and world knowledge influence the way we formulate and interpret utterances. Both sets of papers were influential in significantly broadening the range of phenomena that theoretical linguists attend to.

Central to the first four papers is the observation that when a given verb is used to denote a particular situation, the speaker may have considerable freedom regarding how the participants in the situation are expressed syntactically. Thus, the examples in 1 can all refer to the same event.

(1)

a. Someone opened this door with that key.

b. That key opened this door.

c. This door was opened with that key.

Early generative grammar had posited a common underlying structure for 1a and 1c, with transformations accounting for the different surface forms. F extended this type of analysis to examples like 1b.

These early papers develop the theory of case grammar, whose central claim is that ‘[t]he sentence in its basic structure consists of a verb and one or more noun phrases, each associated with the verb in a particular case relationship … [and] each case relationship occurs only once in a simple sentence’ (45). In ‘The case for case’, F identifies six cases; in ‘Types of lexical information’, he lists seven. Five are common to the two lists: agent, object, result/factitive, instrument, and experiencer/dative. Verbs’ cooccurrence restrictions are stated in terms of cases. In English, the cases are marked in underlying structure by prepositions, some of which (e.g. those marking what would surface as subject and direct object) are deleted transformationally. No explicit formulation of the requisite transformations is provided, though a number of sample derivations are included.

What is best remembered about case grammar is, as F puts it in his preface, the ‘plan to present almost everything that had to do with meaning in a single initial level of representation and to take care of everything else, such as surface form and grammatically related paraphrasings, by means of a generous variety of transformations: including movement, reattachment, deletion, substitution, copying, lexical insertion, and magic’ (vii). A rereading reveals that there is much more, including quite a bit of discussion of earlier, nontransformational literature addressing some of the same issues.

Of particular interest are some typological speculations in ‘The case for case’. Drawing on ideas...