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I am aware of the argument/actant theories, but perhaps there is something like universal semantical coding for the nouns as well.

For Argument concepts,you can see the relevant Wikipedia page for Verb Argument. For Actants and Valency Theory, see Schéma actantiel instead (in French).

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    Can you explain these theories and codings a little more?
    – Cerberus
    Commented Mar 3, 2013 at 12:46
  • Presumably you mean actual paradigmatic cases, instead of something more abstract, like English noun cases?
    – jlawler
    Commented Mar 3, 2013 at 15:35
  • @jlawler: not quite. E.g. Latin or Russian Genitives have several meanings, which are rendered with three actual paradigmatic cases in Basque (Genitive I, Genitive II and Partitive) and with three different cases in Finnish (Genitive, Accusative and Partitive). Or English noun cases rendered with twenty-plus-something Hungarian cases. The question is, if there is any universal semantical blueprint for case description.
    – Manjusri
    Commented Mar 3, 2013 at 17:13
  • English noun cases don't exist in reality, only in abstractions. No English noun has a case ending, and only half a dozen pronouns; that's why I asked. If you believe English has cases, then the answer to your question depends on what you believe these cases are and how they're determined. There are a lot of theories about this, and mostly they're contradictory, so clearly there are lots of possible answers to your question. Do you mean "case" as a paradigmatic morphological phenomenon, or do you mean grammatical relations, or do you mean metaphoric locative markers?
    – jlawler
    Commented Mar 3, 2013 at 18:25
  • If a language has a grammatical paradigm, even for a limited set of language items, then it is a working paradigm for a given language. Yes, none of English adjectives has any cases, and only few pronouns do, but this does not make the things correspondent to Partitive or Genitive non-existing in the English speech. The only difference is that they are represented with particles and adverbs, not with case endings. It does not have anything in common with the locative paradigm.
    – Manjusri
    Commented Mar 3, 2013 at 18:34

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