What goes around, comes around: Cases that keep me going

Abstract

I am fascinated by the treasure trove of meanings tucked away in the grammatical morphemes that many people think of as mere functional fillers. As a student, the Slavic case endings baffled me, then later delighted me with their complex stories about trajectories, time, benefit and harm, labels, and so much more. Some twenty years ago I was satisfied that I had cracked that code, and after writing some articles and a couple of textbooks on the topic, I moved on. But the cases came back to me again and again. In this article, I tell the story of how my work on case semantics later helped to inspire three further projects: two major online resources, the Strategic Mastery of Russian Tool and the Russian Constructicon, and an analysis of president Putin’s portrayal of Russia, Ukraine, and NATO. At first glance it might seem that this line of research is rather shallow and merely descriptive, however digging into case semantics reveals some deep philosophical issues concerning the relationship of meaning to grammar, the assumptions inherent in linguistic reference works, the representation of paradigms in the minds of speakers, and the ways in which we can measure grammatical norms and deviation.