Debated Problems within the Category of Case

To the debated problems within the category of case there refer 1. the existence of this category in English ( Otto Jespersen ridiculed the very idea of case in English as a morphological category, but he recognised it as a logical category); 2. the nature of this category (morphological, syntactical, morphologico-syntactical, logical) The prevalent view is the one that treats case as a morphological category, which is based upon the opposition of two cases: the common case and the genitive case; 3. the number of cases { absence of cases, two cases (the common and the genetive case), many cases. Semantic syntax operates with the notion of deep cases while describing semantic relations within a sentence. Charles Fillmore distinguished a proposition, a predicate and arguments when analysing the semantic structure of a proposition. Arguments perform different semantic roles in the sentence, they are associated with cases. Ch. Fillmore suggests such a set of cases: agentive, objective, locative, instrumental, that of goal, that of patient, that ofsource, that of result, etc. One and the same argument may express different roles{ Theteacher explains the new rule (the agentor the source}). W. Chafe adds the cases of experience and beneficiary( I have seen the world. I have been given flowers); }; 4. the nature of the element –‘s. It is an uncommon inflexion which cannot be likened to possessive inflexions in Slavic languages (печаль расставания, печаль разлуки, крылатый слова звук, лепесток розы - лепесток роз, пара гнедых, etc). In Russian case inflexions are attached to nouns. In English the element -‘s can be attached to all kinds of nouns, numerals, adverbs, adjectives, pronouns, composite words, phrases and even sentences (Tomorrow’s newspaper. He’ll come in an hour or two’s time. Somebody else’s phrase. The blond I was dancing with’s name was something like Alison). All these peculiarities make the scholars (profs. Ilyish, Vorontsova, Palmer, Gleason) consider-‘s to be a postposition or even a form- word, like an auxiliary or a particle, serving to convey the meaning of possession, a sign of syntactical dependence. But most scholars believe -‘s to be a typical case inflexion because it comes from OE genitive case; it expresses relations of a noun to other words; it is phonetically dependent, whereas postpositions are phonetically independent; most often it is attached to nouns. Still it is more peculiar and independent than other English grammatical morphemes.