Cognitive Space and Linguistic Case

This study sheds new light on the complex relationship between cognitive and linguistic categories. Challenging the view of cases as categories in cognitive space Schlesinger proposes a new understanding of the concept of case. Drawing on evidence from psycholinguistic research and English language data he argues that case categories are in fact composed of more primitive cognitive notions: features and dimensions. These are registered in the lexical entries of individual verbs thereby allowing certain metaphorical extensions. This new approach to case permits better descriptions of certain syntactic phenomena than has hitherto been possible as Schlesinger illustrates through the analysis of the feature compositions of three cases.