Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

A SYNOPSIS OF ROLE AND REFERENCE GRAMMAR 7

In this representation, an arrow indicates that the periphery is an adjunct to
the core.
The RRG conception of the LSC is thus a semantically-based theory of
non-relational syntactic structure; that is, the fundamental units in the
hierarchical organization of sentences and clauses are semantically moti­
vated by the contrast between predicate and argument, on the one hand,
and that between argument-like entities which are related to the predicate
and those that are not, on the other. These units are, however, syntactic
units. This is the essence of the distinction between predicate and nucleus in
the LSC, for example: the predicate is semantic in nature and is rep­
resented semantically, while the nucleus is the syntactic unit which contains
one or more predicating elements. A major difference between RRG and
most generative theories is that the notion of "core" has no direct counter­
part in X-bar-based theories, and conversely, the category of VP, which
plays a central role in GB, for example, has no analog in the LSC.

1.3 Operators

In Figure 2, the auxiliary verb did is not attached to anything, and this is

because it is not part of the nucleus, core or periphery. It is, rather, the

morphological realization of a tense operator which modifies the clause.

Grammatical categories like aspect, tense, and modality are treated as

operators modifying different layers of the clause. Each of the clause levels

is modified by one or more operators. Examples of operators from a variety

of languages are given in (2), and the operators are summarized in Table l.^7