A Musing

For years now, I've wanted to come up with a morphological category for nouns that isn't case, but is somewhat like it. In some sense, a case marking that is decoupled from theta roles as well as from notions like subject and object - although I am not quite sure what remains to go for once those notions have been removed from the playing field.

I go from wanting to include things like animacy, volition, whether the outcome is beneficial or not to entire rejecting those as part of it. Other times I want some more exotic things: whether a noun is normally part of the action, legitimacy of claims or statuses, social status, mechanics of what happens in the event the verb phrase refers to, imagined emotions of the involved, importance visavis the discourse, etc. 

Never have I come up with anything I've been happy with - in part I guess the reason is that what I am looking for is just something vaguely other yet vaguely similar, and I want something fresh and unattested.