Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

10 ROBERT D. VAN VALIN, JR.

1.4 Formal representation of clause structure

Since operators are technically not part of the nucleus, core or periphery,

but rather are modifiers of these units and combinations thereof, it is

reasonable that they should be represented separately from the predicates

and arguments that they modify. Moreover, predicates and arguments are

subject to language-specific constraints on their ordering, while the primary

principle governing the ordering of operators is the universal scope con­

straint mentioned above. The main language-specific consideration affect­

ing their occurrence is the basic word-order type of the language, which

governs whether the operators are predominantly prefixes or suffixes, if

they are bound morphemes, or whether they occur before or after the

nucleus, if they are free morphemes. But the ordering among them is deter-