A well -Known property of the Korean light verb construction(=LVC) is the locality mismatch between theta-marking and case -marking on the accusative -marked theme: e.g. Kim paksa -ka mullihak-uI yenkwu-lul hayssta ``Dr. Kim studied physics``. The accusative theme receives its theta- role inside the verbal noun phrase (=VNP). but seems to be case-marked by a verbal element outside the VNP. Interestingly, the locality problem never occurs in the Hindi LVC. In this paper, I develop a case theory under the framework of conceptual semantics (Jackendoff 1990. 1997. 2002) to explain why the locality problem occurs in one language. and not in another. In this theory, case is assigned in the syntactic and semantic modules independently: case alternation results from the mismatch between syntactic case and semantic case. The theme argument receives syntactic genitive inside the VNP. and semantic accusative because it is lower in rank in the thematic hierarchy than the actor argument. Korean allows case alternation when syntactic case conflicts with semantic case. We set up the paramenter in the opposite direction for Hindi: i.e. Hindi realizes only the syntactic case when syntactic case does not match its semantic counterpart. This simple parameter shows that the locality problem is merely an epiphenomenon of the surface case resolution.