Taipei: Student Book Co. Ltd., 1981. — vii, 300 p. (Monographs on modern linguistics)
臺灣學生書局. 莫建清 立陶宛語語法試論
If one reads the quotation again, one will have to observe that the verb is the central semantic and, because of that, the central syntactic part of speech, and the verb has to be analyzed in terms what possible (deep) cases it may govern, or require. And that is what Dr. Mo's book is mainly about: how to classify the various verbs of Lithuanian from this point of view. Although the book goes much further: in order to show how the deep cases are expressed with various syntactic correlations, much of the surface structure description of Lithuanian is also given, except phonological analysis which does not pertain much to the problems discussed in the book. The book has four basic chapters: 1. Case Grammar Theory and Modifications; 2. The Base Component; 3. A Case Grammar Classification of Lithuanian Verbs; 4. Realization Rules. There is also Bibliography (pp. 276-285) and an Appendix (pp. 286-300) which is really a partial case grammar lexicon of Lithuanian verbs. Like many of the theoretical approaches to language analysis which aim at analyzing the deep structure of any language, the case grammar theory does not claim a unified approach. In other words, nobody can agree upon some basic problems: how many cases to posit, what are these basic cases, etc. Dr. Mo admits this quite frankly: "The case theory is hindered by a lack or precise definitions for the deep cases and by the problem of what and how many cases are really relevant to language description", (p. 266). However, Dr. Mo, for the very first time, uses this approach in analyzing spoken Lithuanian, and finds that this approach can be fruitfully used for Lithuanian. Thus, it is a new and valuable contribution not only to Lithuanian linguistics but also to the general linguistic theory.