This book deals with 'case' in Fillmore's (1968) sense and Schlesinger's conception of the nature and workings of case or 'thematic' relations as mapping between syntactic structures and extralinguistic cognitive representations. Four related themes emerge: the general nature of case relations; linking of subjects; linking of non-subjects and agentivity. The focus is on English, but S. tries to distinguish between the language-specific and the universal.