Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

A SYNOPSIS OF ROLE AND REFERENCE GRAMMAR 111

cosubordination (91b), (92b); core coordination (102a,b,c); core subordina­
tion (102e), (105); core cosubordination (102d); nuclear coordination
(104a); nuclear cosubordination (104b,,d,e). It should be noted that lan­
guages need not have all nine linkage categories, and most in fact do not;
this number represents the maximum number a language could have.
The nine juncture-nexus types, while purely syntactic, are used to
express certain semantic relations between the units in the juncture, e.g.
causation, purpose, and temporal sequence (See Van Valin & Wilkins, this
volume, for detailed discussion). These semantic relations form a con­
tinuum expressing the degree of semantic cohesion between the proposi-
tional units linked in the complex structure, i.e. the degree to which they
express aspects of a single action or event or discrete events. It is captured in
the Interclausal Semantic Relations Hierarchy in Figure 29b. The relation­
ship between the syntactic and semantic relations in clause linkage is very
complex, i.e. it is not one-to-one, but there are some striking regularities
cross-linguistically. The syntactic linkage relations may be ranked hierarchi­
cally in terms of the strength of the syntactic bond between the units, and
the semantic relations may likewise be ranked in terms of how closely
related the propositions in the linkage are, i.e. to what extent they are
coded as aspects of a single action or event or as discrete events. The prim­
ary principle governing the interaction of the two hierarchies is: the closer
the semantic relation between two propositions is, the stronger the syntactic
link joining them. This is represented in the Interclausal Relations Hierar­
chy in Figure 29c. In particular, while there is often more than one syntactic
realization of a particular semantic relation, e.g. causality, the tightest syn-