Grammatical case vs semantic case

Question

I'm not sure what these terms mean. In my lecture notes I wrote that grammatical case is used to show the syntactic functions of a nominal syntagm, depending on its relation to the verb. Semantic case, on the other hand, doesn't show the syntactic function but rather the semantic one.

As I don't have any examples for this, I find it hard to understand. Could this for example mean that even though a certain nominal syntagm is grammaticaly in accusative (so there are affixes for accusative) it actually has attributive meaning (so semantically it's genitive)?

Answer 1

That's pretty much it. Languages do some idiosyncratic stuff with their grammatical cases:

I remember you (obj). (English)
Meminī tuī (gen). (Latin)
Ich errinere an dich (acc). (Northern German)

Sometimes, sentences with the same semantic meaning even use different grammatical cases, like in Ancient Greek (transliterated):

Mnēmoneúō sé (with accusative)
Mémnēmai soû (with genitive)

Yet in all of these examples, the last word is, semantically, the thing being remembered (the "theme"). The syntax doesn't change that.