A SYNOPSIS OF ROLE AND REFERENCE GRAMMAR 9The nuclear operators have scope over the nucleus; they modify the action,
event or state itself without reference to the participants. Core operators
modify the relation between a core argument, normally the actor, and the
action; this is especially true of core directionals and modality. Clausal
operators, as the name implies, modify the clause as a whole. They fall into
two groups, one containing tense and status, and the other evidentials and
IF. Tense and status situate the proposition expressed by the clause within
temporal and realis-irrealis continua; evidentials indicate the epistemologi
ca! basis of the state of affairs (the proposition plus tense and status
operators) expressed, i.e. how the speaker came to have the information
being uttered, while IF specifies the type of speech act. Hence evidentials
and IF are modifiers of the sentence or utterance as a whole, rather than
one of its constituent clauses; they are thus "sentential" in nature. The
classification of a particular operator as nuclear, core or clausal is a direct
function of its meaning. No language need have all of these operators as
grammatical categories; for example, English, unlike Kewa and Quechua,
does not have evidentials as a grammatical category.
One of the major claims regarding operators made in FVV is that the
ordering of the morphemes expressing operators with respect to the verb
indicates their relative scopes. That is, taking the nucleus (verb) as the ref
erence point, the morphemes realizing nuclear operators should be closer
to the nucleus than those expressing core operators, and those manifesting
clausal operators should be outside of those signalling nuclear and core
operators. The ordering of the operators in the sentences in (2) exemplifies
this pattern. This claim assumes, crucially, that a relative order among the
morphemes with reference to the nucleus can be established. If, for exam
ple, tense is a prefix and aspect is a suffix on the verb, then no relative
ordering can be determined and therefore this claim is not applicable; if, on
the other hand, both are suffixes, then the claim is that the aspect suffix
would be between the verb stem and the tense suffix. A large number of
languages are surveyed in FVV and Bybee (1985), and no exceptions to this
general claim are found. Thus, the ordering of operator-expressing affixes
in e.g. Turkish follows exactly the same principle as auxiliary elements in
English. It should be noted that within a group of operators at the same
level, there is some variation in ordering. Aspect is normally inside of nuc
lear directionals, but in a few languages it occurs outside of them. Tense
and status vary in their position relative to each other across languages (cf.
FVV:214-8), but they are always inside of evidentials and IF; universally,
IF is always the outermost operator over the clause.