Book excerpt: The papers in this volume have been grouped in three thematic parts: Valence which plays a key concept in the syntactic classification of verbs and adjectives, provides a necessary link for decoding and encoding grammatical relations, and is an important requisite for the evaluation of formal languages for the purpose of describing and explaining phenomena of natural language. The second group of papers concerns the notion of (deep) case and the implications of tracing a grammatical theory on semantic case. The final series of papers is distinguished by the degree of accent it puts on the link between linguistic surface phenomena, including semantic case, and grammatical relations, in the sense that it has been postulated by Universal Grammar.