So let’s talk about outfits.
No matter where you are or what you do, if you want to fit in, you’ll probably dress the part.
An FBI agent working tirelessly to expose Soviet spies might put on a suit and flash
their badge, while an undercover Russian operative trying to blend in will probably ditch their
furry ushanka hat and slip into something a bit more American.
And just like people, words’ll often wrap themselves up in whatever garb matches the
grammatical role they’re supposed to play.
So, where do they get these getups, and what do they do when they can’t find anything that fits?
I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is The Ling Space.
Verbs are kind of like the engines that drive sentences, and they usually come with a set
of pretty specific instructions.
The act of poisoning, for instance, comes with two clearly defined roles that have to
be filled: a poisoner, and someone who gets poisoned, as in “Elizabeth poisoned the college student."
Something like “give” has three: a giver, a recipient, and whatever’s being exchanged,
like in “William gave the container to Philip.”
These words can’t function unless they’re supplied with the necessary pieces to complete the picture.
Zooming out a little, we can find patterns across different verbs.
Both “poison” and “give,” along with countless other verbs, need agents — phrases
that represent the doer of the action.
And verbs often also need themes, which are the people and things that a verb affects.
Of course, verbs can have other requirements, too, like experiencers of emotional states,
locations for the actions to take place, and goals to move towards.
In an earlier episode, we called these more generic roles “theta roles”, and to guarantee that
they get filled, we introduced the Theta Criterion, which is a kind of rule that makes sure that the
scaffolding holding up our sentences sets aside just the right amount of space that each verb needs.
Now, in a language like English, picking out which roles match which phrases is usually
as easy as keeping track of a sentence’s grammatical relations, like its subject and object.
And since word order’s pretty strict, it really just comes down to what shows up before
the verb, and what shows up after.
As long as we’re able to follow what goes where, we can sort of recreate who’s doing
what to whom; the subject’s usually going to be the agent, while the object will typically
be some kind of theme.
But what about languages whose word order isn’t as rigid?
To tell apart subjects, objects, and other grammatical bits and pieces, languages with
more flexible word orders make use of case.
Case is a way of directly marking the grammatical role played by the parts of a sentence.
The varieties of English spoken a millennium ago had a freer word order, and used five
different cases to keep on top of things.
But over time, it lost these distinctions, and now only has a few.
In modern English, case only shows up on pronouns: it’s what gives us the difference between
they, their, and them.
On the other hand, modern German still has some flexibility baked into it, and keeps
track of everything by altering the forms of its noun phrases.
Both “Der Mann sieht den Hund” and “Den Hund sieht der Mann” can express the same
thought — that the man sees the dog.
The reordering doesn’t mess with the basic idea, since German's nominative
and accusative determiners point out the subject and object, respectively.
Of course, we can’t forget Latin, which on top of gender and number and five independent
noun classes, infamously also employed six cases.
Latin used various suffixes to express many of the categories we’ve seen already, while
adding others like the vocative, which is used when addressing people.
And case systems extend well beyond Indo-European languages, too.
Hungarian puts Latin to shame with its 18 cases, and Japanese has at least 9.
So, it looks as if case is a handy way to follow the plot of a sentence without getting
lost about which parts are doing what.
It’s like a costume or a uniform that words wear to tell the world “Hey, I’m a subject”
or “Look, I’m an object.”
But, is that really all there is to the story?
Or can we throw on our spy glasses and look a little bit closer?
As it turns out, we can actually gain a deeper understanding of what case is by asking another
question we haven’t fully explored yet: why words move.
Going all the way back to the beginning of this series, we’ve been saying that words
aren’t always happy with where you put them; sometimes they get a bit antsy, and need to
go out for a walk.
It’s easiest to see this in questions, like in “What did Paige say to Pastor Tim?”
In theory, that “what” should follow the verb “say,” since it’s what Paige said,
and because English usually puts that kind of information after the verb, not before.
But because it’s a question, that wh-word has moved over to the front.
In this case, it’s fairly straightforward to say that things were moved around to make
it more obvious we’re asking something, instead of telling.
But we’ve seen other kinds of movement that don’t have as obvious an explanation.
For instance, in our episode on raising verbs, we looked at sentences like “Paige seems
to be worried about keeping their secret.”
We argued that the subject — Paige — is actually more closely connected to “worry”
than “seem,” since people are generally worriers, and not seemers.
And so we concluded that “Paige” must be climbing out of the lower clause to become
the subject of the higher one.
Since English sentences always need a subject, something has to fill that position.
But that higher subject position can be filled in other ways, like with the non-referential pronoun "it."
So like, “It seems that Paige is worried about keeping their secret.”
And in this case, Paige stays put.
Notice that each option connects up to a slightly different structure: if Paige moves, the lower
clause is tenseless, which you can tell because it’s still "to be."
But if Paige stays put, it’s tensed, with "is."
We can’t say either “Paige seems that is worried about keeping their secret” or
“It seems Paige to be worried about keeping their secret.”
So what’s going on, here?
Insight in how to solve this puzzle came in the early 1980s, when linguist Noam Chomsky
proposed that this kind of movement actually revolved around the phenomenon of case.
In particular, he suggested that case isn’t only something that noun phrases may have,
it’s something that they must have — even if it isn’t always so obvious, like in English.
To be able to show up in any given sentence, a noun phrase has to go find a spot where it
can receive case.
And those spots are in limited supply; for subjects, it means being right up next to a tensed verb.
Let’s see how this actually works.
So, the idea is that we start off with a structure that has some verb in it — say, “pass”.
That verb needs an agent subject and a theme object to make up a complete sentence; in
comes the Theta Criterion, to make sure that those parts are filled.
But this clause happens to be tenseless, which means that the subject can’t stay put to get
the nominative case that it needs.
Luckily, there’s a tensed verb in the next clause up, so the subject pronoun climbs to
the top of the tree where it can finally take the nominative form “she”.
In tensed clauses, no movement is needed.
We can be sure that nominative case must be assigned to noun phrases only in the presence
of tensed verbs, because we never see it happen next to tenseless ones.
In fact, in those cases where we do see subjects in tenseless clauses, because they have nowhere
higher to climb, they’ve always taken on an accusative form, as in “They expect her to co-operate."
It’s as if, to rescue the subject of the lower clause from being filtered out on account
of its case-less-ness, the higher verb treats it as an object.
Verbs like “expect” engage in this exceptional case-marking because every noun phrase needs
case to make it into the sentence.
Even full noun phrases like “meeting” or “investigation,” which don’t show
any obvious sign of having case in English, need to either be direct objects or the subjects
of tensed clauses.
Extending the idea a bit further, we can even begin to see why different languages have different word orders.
If it’s true that all languages underlyingly have the same sentential architecture, the
reason that noun phrases can show up in such drastically different places follows from
each system assigning case in a different position.
In English, an SVO language, nominative case is assigned to the left of the verb, but in
VSO languages like Irish, it’s assigned to the right.
So what ends up where really depends on where each language decides to hand out case.
We’ve even seen what happens when noun phrases don’t make it through this Case Filter.
In the sentence “Gabriel claims to know what’s best for the Jennings family,”
the subject “Gabriel” hasn’t risen up out of the lower clause, since he really is
the one doing the claiming.
But because he’s also doing the knowing, we’ve argued there must be a silent pronoun
that refers back to Gabriel, sitting at the front of the embedded clause.
So, the sentence comes out to mean something like “Gabriel claims he knows what’s best
for the Jennings family.”
With this new idea at our disposal, we can finally make sense of why this should be.
Because the lower clause has no tense, and the verb “claim” isn’t the sort that
can assign case to something following it, our silent pronoun is left out in the cold.
As speakers, we understand it’s there.
But it remains unpronounced, because it has no way of getting any case.
If the Theta Criterion is like a casting director, this need for case — overt or otherwise — is kind of like an editor.
A noun phrase might make it into a sentence, but if it can’t manage to find the right
wardrobe, it just won’t make it into the picture.
So, we’ve reached the end of The Ling Space for this week.
If you moved to the right place, you learned that case can be a good way of keeping track
of which words are doing what in a sentence; that noun phrases actually need case, whether
overt or covert, to actually make the final cut into our sentences; and that in order
to get case, words sometimes need to move around, which explains certain kinds of movement,
and different word orders.
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