Cases and Thematic Roles

This study examines the mapping of thematic roles, such as agent and patient, onto syntactic cases, such as nominative or ergative, or onto structural relations in a cross-linguistic survey that is supplemented with German data. It is shown that cases and structural relations code different aspects of thematic structure and that cases cannot be derived from structural relations in universal grammar. The phenomena that characterize ergative and active languages are shown to be restricted to case mapping.