Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

A SYNOPSIS OF ROLE AND REFERENCE GRAMMAR 151

of clean, after all of the non-PCS arguments have been linked. Both
nominative case and agreement with what follow from the status of what as
the highest ranking direct macrorole in the clause.

8. Future directions

This paper has presented a summary of the major theoretical constructs of
Role and Reference Grammar and given an overview of the areas in which
work in the theory has been undertaken. In no area can the analyses be said
to be definitive, and many areas have been touched on only briefly, e.g.
complex NP syntax, restrictions on question formation, and much more
work on these and other topics is required. Anaphora, an issue of central
concern in contemporary syntactic theory, has not been dealt with at all;
see Van Valin (1990b) for a presentation of how anaphoric phenomena
would be analyzed within RRG. Two major directions for future work in
RRG are: (1) the development of a finer grained semantic decomposition,
along the lines sketched in Van Valin & Wilkins (this volume), which will
permit the formulation of much more extensive generalizations about a
number of grammatical phenomena, e.g. preposition assignment, comple­
ment selection; (2) the integration of the theory of information structure
with a broader theory of discourse structure, so that the interaction of dis­
course-pragmatics and syntax can be explored in more detail and in more
domains, expanding beyond the problem of reference tracking discussed in
FVV and Van Valin (1987b). In addition, RRG provides an explanatory
framework for the analysis of child language and language acquisition (see
Van Valin 1991a). While many of the issues to be investigated are shared
with other syntactic theories, many of them are posed as a result of RRG's
structural-functionalist orientation and go beyond the narrower range of
problems to which autonomous syntax approaches address themselves.

Notes

* The first draft of this paper was written while I was at the University of California,

Davis, and was supported in part by a UC Davis Faculty Research Grant. I would

like to thank the participants in my graduate seminar on RRG at UC Berkeley in

1989-90 for their comments on earlier drafts, especially Randy LaPolla. I would

also like to thank David Wilkins, Knud Lambrecht and Linda Schwartz for com­

ments on an earlier draft.