Case and Grammatical Relations

The papers in this volume can be grouped into two broad, overlapping classes: those dealing primarily with case and those dealing primarily with grammatical relations. With regard to case, topics include descriptions of the case systems of two Caucasian languages, the problems of determining how many cases Russian has and whether Hungarian has a case system at all, the issue of case-combining, the retention of the dative in Swedish dialects, and genitive objects in the languages of Europe. With regard to grammatical relations, topics include the order of obliques in OV and VO languages, the effects of the referential hierarchy on the distribution of grammatical relations, the problem of whether the passive requires a subject category, the relation between subjecthood and definiteness, and the issue of how the loss of case and aspectual systems triggers the use of compensatory mechanisms in heritage Russian.

Peter Arkadiev, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, on Linguist List 20.2671, 2009:
This collection of papers in honor of Bernard Comrie, despite certain weaker points (both conceptual and technical), is a very valuable contribution to the typological and empirical study of case and grammatical relations across languages, and, last but not least, it is indeed worthy as a Festschrift to so eminent a scholar as Bernard Comrie.