A SYNOPSIS OF ROLE AND REFERENCE GRAMMAR 107(102) a. John forced Bill to leave the party. English
b. Je laisserai Jean manger les gâteaux. French
lsG let.FUT John eat the cakes
"I'll let John eat the cakes."
c. Tä jiäo wö xië zi. Mandarin Chinese
3sG teach ISG write characters
"He teaches me to write."
d. Fu fi fase isoe. Barai [Papua-New Guinea]
3SG sit letter write
"He sat (down) and wrote a letter."
e. X-0-w-ilwe hin-watx'e-n kap camixe. Jacaltec
PAST-3ABS-1SG.ERG lsG.ERG-make-suFF CL shirt [Mayan]
"I tried to make the shirt." (lit.: "I tried it, I make the
shirt.")In a core juncture there are two nuclei, each with its own set of core argu
ments, constituting two distinct but overlapping cores; they overlap in that
the linked units share one core argument. In (102a), Bill is semantically an
argument of both verbs, as is Jean in (b), wo, "I" in (e), fu "he" in (d), and
the first person argument in (e). Crucially, the other arguments are coded
as arguments of particular nuclei, e.g. in (a) John is an argument, syntacti
cally and semantically, of force only, while the party is similarly an argu
ment of leave alone. A core juncture (with coordinate nexus) may be
schematically represented as in Figure 27a, while the French example in
(102b) (which involves coordinate nexus) is represented in Figure 27b.