Case , 20 Years Later

The theory of abstract Case in the framework of Government and Binding played an important role in capturing cross-linguistic generalizations regarding order and constituency and accommodating exceptions to word order universals. Case was shown to be relevant even in languages without morphological case markings. Indeed, Li (1985, 1990) demonstrated that Case facilitated the understading of a wide range of grammatical structures in Chinese. However, as the linguistic theory evolved, it became possible to replace a Case approach to word order with a verb-raising analysis, which seems to challenge the signifycance of Case in the grammar of Chinese. This paper is to show that the empirical generalizations supporting Case in the earlier works but questioned in some other works are still valid, and that the research on Case further sheds light on other issues such as the finer structure of clauses in Chinese.