Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

A SYNOPSIS OF ROLE AND REFERENCE GRAMMAR 95

The question in (84) establishes studenti "students" as topical, and the ele­
ment in the answer corresponding to the WH-word in the question must be
focal. Ne instantiates the topical head noun, while the focal quantifier
appears, as predicted, in immediately postverbal position. Thus a complete
statement of the semantic and pragmatic conditions on ne would be as in
(85).
(85) Afe-cliticization: ne realizes the topical head of an NP with a focal
quantifier, and this NP must be the lowest ranking argument (in
terms of the Α-U hierarchy) of the state predicate in the LS of
the predicate in the clause.
In order to exemplify the linking in an Italian clause with ne in detail,
we must modify the linking algorithm presented in (63) to include pragma­
tic function assignment; this is given in (86).
(86) Linking from Logical Structure to Syntactic Structure (Revised)

1. Determine the semantic roles of the arguments, based on
   their position in the decomposed semantic structure.


2. Determine actor and undergoer assignments, following the
   Α-U Hierarchy in (25).


3. Assign pragmatic functions (topic, focus) to the elements in
   the clause.


4. Assign actor and undergoer to specific morphosyntactic func­
   tions.
   a. This is language-specific (see 39).
   b. In syntactically accusative languages, the accessibility to
   pivot is A > U.
    In Italian, core-internal topical elements must be prenuc-
   lear, core-internal focal elements postnuclear.


5. Assign the remaining core arguments their appropriate case
   markers/prepositions.


6. If there is a focus NP which is [+WH], then assign it to the
   PCS.
   The linking in (81b) is presented in Figure 24; the numbers refer to the
   steps in (86). Steps 1 and 2 are the same as before: the thematic relations of
   the arguments are ascertained from their positions in the LS, and actor and
   undergoer are determined following the hierarchy in (25). The major
   change involves the assignment of pragmatic functions to elements in the
   clause, step 3. In the Russian examples and in (79) this is straightforward,