Semantic Rules and Cases:
The next category of rules tells us about how to go about understanding the meaning of the sentence, i.e., who, what, why, on what etc. conveyed by it.
Let us consider an example.
The man ate the mango in the evening
Who? action/verb what? when?
Generally, semantics (or meaning) of the sentence is centered around the verb, with all other phrases relating to the verb in one way or the other. This relation of phrases with the verb is called case relation. The number and type of case relation are independent of the language. However, the way these cases are connected with the verb to make the sentence meaningful, is what is different in different languages.
Let us first look at some case relations and what they specify.
Questions Cases
Who? Agent or subject
What? Object(Intransitive verb)
When? Time
With what? Instrument
From where? Source
To where? Destination
For whom? Beneficiary
With whom? Accompanier
I
gave
my friend a
book yesterday.
Agent
Beneficiary
Object
Time
The captain left for
England from India with his
team.
Agent
Destination
Source
Accompanier
Now that we have found out what the different types of cases are, we will see how the cases are determined for English. Consider the example :
The man ate the mango in the evening
We see that the noun phrase 'The man' is the Agent by virtue of it being before the verb and 'the mango' is the object as it comes immediately after the verb. All other cases are normally prepositional phrases where the prepositions along with the meaning of the phrase determine the case.