no ROBERT D. VAN VALIN, JR.
plementation, the use of clauses as core arguments. See FVV, 251-255, for
a detailed discussion of the marked nature of these constructions.
Each of these abstract clause-linkage types subsumes more than one
formal construction type. For example, all of the following exemplify core
subordination in English.
(105) a. That John won the race surprised no one.
b. John s winning the race surprised everyone.
For John to win the race would be the surprise of the year.
In all of these sentences the dependent unit serves as a core argument of the
nucleus in the main clause, despite the formal diversity among them.
There are two senses of "grammatical construction" which are impor
tant in RRG. The first is the abstract complex construction such as "core
coordination" as represented in Figure 27a. It is an abstract template which
represents the essential features which define complex constructions of this
type. The second is the language-specific instantiations of these abstract
constructions, as exemplified in Figures 27b, 28b, 30 and 31, and in (105).
A language's inventory of complex constructions can be viewed as a set of
templates, each of which conforms to the abstract requirements for the par
ticular type of linkage as determined by universal grammar. Thus RRG
falls between GB theory, on the one hand, which specifically denies the val
idity of the notion of grammatical construction (Chomsky 1988), and Fill-
morean Construction Grammar (Fillmore 1988), on the other, in which
only language-specific construction templates are posited.
The examples in (91)-(105) illustrate the following juncture-nexus
types: clausal coordination (91a); clausal subordination (91c), (92a); clausal