Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

118 ROBERT D. VAN VALIN, JR.

clausal domain, then X is the actor of a transitive verb in the clause and

would receive ergative case, despite being in a core with an intransitive

verb. The case assignment rules in (61a,b) can be applied to English con­

structions such as the one in Figure 31 in a straightforward way: John is the

highest ranking direct core macrorole in the clause and therefore receives

nominative case, while the other direct core macroroles, Bill and car,

receive accusative case, following (61b). Thus, case marking operates

within the clause as a whole and not within the constituent cores individu­

ally in a core juncture.

Operators are not directly relevant to the determination of subordina­

tion, since the crucial defining feature of subordination is embedding, and

it is distinguished from the other two nexus types by that feature.^57 In the

discussion of Amele it was noted that with respect to operator dependence

subordinate clauses behave for the most part like coordinate constructions;

hence the issue of operator dependence is relevant only to the non-embed­

ded nexus types. That is, if the defining features of nexus types are consid­

ered to be [±embedded] and [±dependent], as proposed in FVV and Van

Valin (1984), then the feature marking the most fundamental distinction is

[±embedded], contra FVV and Van Valin (1984) in which the two features

are assumed to be of equal status. In other words, the fundamental contrast

is between embedded and non-embedded constructions, and the coordina-

tion-cosubordination contrast expresses a distinction between non-subordi­

nate linkage types only. This can be represented as a feature tree as in Fig­

ure 34.