Case: Principle Or Parameter?

Since Chomsky (1981) introduced"Case"into TG, and developed it into Case Theory forming one of the modules, Case Theory has been going through the following phases: Government-Based Case Theory, Agr-Based Case Theory and then Agr-less Case Theory.Through comparison and analysis, we discover that the uniformity, simplification and efficiency of theory are the main concern of the above three phases of Case Theory. Unfortunately, they all have great trouble in achieving their aim. With a lot of counter-examples, all of them should be claimed to be weak prediction from the scientific point of view.Meanwhile, data from English, Chinese, and French throw light on"Case": For UG, Case is external, optional and unnecessary; Case is not the motivation of movement in syntactic structure, and should be cancelled; At most, Case can be regarded as semantically extrinsic interpretation of syntactic structure. Crucially speaking, Case is a parameter, but not a principle.Based on the above analyses, a notion of Non-Case, which is initiated by Professor Zhao Yanchun, is elaborated as below:Subject and predicate are indispensable to language, being realized as [S [NP [VP]]]. Abiding by the principle of discreteness, recursiveness and hierarchy of language, logical frame is derived as follows:NPs each have an unchangeable form in lexicon, thus no morphological derivation between each other; they are ready for being taken out into the logical frame. Abstract Case is cancelled from UG. Syntactic structures are base-generated, and then adjusted by the logic operator. The unadjusted is called Non-IP, and the NP in the state of Non-IP is called Non-Case.As for English, object is realized as non-Case, thus only subject and non-Case are preserved.New design shows more features of simplification, uniformity and efficiency than previous Case theories.