Case System In Decline And Hierarchy Of Case

Case is a grammatical category marking the relationship of a noun to a verb or a noun to an adposition. It connects various linguistic departments, including syntax,morphology, semantics, and has been possessed by a bunch of languages. Guided by the principle of uniformitarianism in linguistic evolution and the panchronic paradigm proposed by de Saussure, this research mainly focuses on the prominence of case and thereby is composed of two parts, namely the distribution of case at the synchronic level and the decline of case at the diachronic level. If one case is more prominent, it takes up a left spot of the hierarchy, boasts a bigger distributional potential and loses its marker more slowly.First of all, on basis of Blake’s(2001: 1) definition, the research proposes a set of five criteria to determine whether a case is ‘case’. Following the criteria, the author investigates the case systems of one hundred and fifty eight languages and standardizes all the terms. By contrasting the distribution and the syncretic potential of varied cases, a new implicational hierarchy of case is suggested, NOM >ACC/ERG > GEN > DAT > LOC > ABL > INST > ALLA > COM > others. In this hierarchy, the dative case does not prevail against some major semantic cases in distribution, although it is traditionally categorized as a grammatical case. The ablative should be higher than the instrumental on the hierarchy in that the ablative shows a stronger adaptability for different case systems. As the comitative and theallative lead too much over the minor peripheral cases in distribution, both of the two deserve a place on the hierarchy.After that, an interpretation of the case hierarchy is provided. Firstly, the case hierarchy shows the degree of grammaticalization of case markers. Secondly, the case hierarchy implies the degree of concreteness of case. Thirdly, the case hierarchy indicates the semantic closeness between the typical syntactic component encoded by one case and the main verb. In addition, the case hierarchy also reflects the frequency of use for case and the degree of difficulty in acquiring an alternative strategy for case.Basically the competition of the two determines the order of case decay.At last, the thesis describes the deflection of case system in different phases,including proto language, old language and middle language, of French and Greek.The case study above proves that the case hierarchy is still applicable for linguistic evolution. Moreover, some phenomena, like loss of case system in Middle English,syncretism of the comitative and instrumental in Basque, the unique pattern of genitive-dative conflation in Balkan Sprachbund and case reduction in non-standard languages, are illustrated to signify the huge impact exerted by language contact over the decline of case system. In other words, the contact of two languages leads to the isomorphism and the process produces the disharmony between the case hierarchy and the sequence of extinction of various cases.