Peter opened Paul the door

Letters

Vol. 31 No. 14 · 23 July 2009

From Chris Sinha

‘The Case for Case’, the words chosen to describe Leofranc Holford-Strevens’s review on the cover of the last issue, are the same as the title of a seminal article from 1967 by the Berkeley linguist Charles J. Fillmore, in which he advanced what he called Case Grammar – a development of, and major departure from, the ‘pure syntax’ version of generative linguistics advocated by Chomsky (LRB, 9 July). Holford-Strevens is right to note the long history of the notion of case in linguistics, extending back to Panini and the Sanskrit grammarians, but Fillmore’s article was a kind of opening shot in the ‘linguistics wars’ of the late 20th century. Generative linguistics has since embraced case as a fundamental component of grammar. Fillmore’s approach, however, led to the breakaway 1970s movement gathered under the banner of Generative Semantics, and to his own later Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar. Case Grammar was fundamental, then, to the articulation of the contemporary approach in linguistics called Cognitive Linguistics, which (like Panini) takes meaning to be central to the explanation of form and structure.

Chris Sinha
Havant, Hampshire

From Nick Wray

Leofranc Holford-Strevens, in mentioning the survival of case forms for English first and third-person pronouns, leaves out the only relic of which I’m aware of the dative case still current in English. In the word alive (from Old English on līfe, according to the Collins English Dictionary) the f of life is voiced to v because of the Old English dative -e ending, which is itself no longer pronounced.

Nick Wray
Derby