Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

A SYNOPSIS OF ROLE AND REFERENCE GRAMMAR 109

actor of the second occurs between them; in the nuclear junctures, how­
ever, the verbs occur adjacent to one another, forming a single, complex
predicate, and the undergoer appears immediately after the whole nucleus.
Nuclear juncture with coordinate nexus may be represented schematically
as in Figure 28a, and the French nuclear juncture in (104b) (which involves
cosubordinate nexus) is represented in Figure 28b.
There are, then, three possible levels of juncture, clausal, core and
nuclear, and there are three possible nexus relations among the units in the
juncture, coordination, subordination, and cosubordination. All three
types of nexus are possible in all three forms of juncture, and accordingly
there are nine possible juncture-nexus types in universal grammar. These
may be ranked in terms of the tightness of the syntactic bond involved in
the linkage. This is represented in the hierarchy in Figure 29a. There is a
basic principle governing these constructions: the unmarked linkage
involves units at the same level of juncture, i.e. nucleus with nucleus, core
with core, and clause with clause. The major exception to this is com-