Nuclear and Non-Nuclear Cases
A Continuum
We first briefly present the terminology and criteria which are commonly used in the linguistic literature in relation with the distinction between nuclear cases and non-nuclear cases. We emphasize the specific position obliques occupy with respect to these criteria and give a short overview on how this is accounted for in different theoretical frameworks. We pay some attention to the definition of “event schemas” and provide a series of concrete examples of specific form-meaning correlates. In the last section we introduce the different papers of this volume on prepositional and adverbial phrases expressing semantic roles typically associated with oblique case, such as instrumental, causal, spatial, temporal, etc. roles.