Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

A SYNOPSIS OF ROLE AND REFERENCE GRAMMAR 13

operator over the clause. LDP phrases, by contrast, are outside of the
clause and therefore outside of the scope of the IF operator; hence they
cannot be asserted, questioned or denied.

(3) a. Yesterday, did you see Bill at the beach?

b. Did you see Bill at the beach yesterday?

In a question like (3a), when the addressee went to the beach is not at issue;
the temporal adverbial is in sentence-initial position (LDP) set off from the
remainder by a pause and is not being questioned. In (3b), on the other
hand, yesterday is clause-internal in the periphery and can be construed as
the focus of the question. The clearest case illustrating the opposition
between the LDP and the PCS in English is sentences like Yesterday, what
did John show to Mary in the library? in Figure 2 in which both positions are
filled. This simple sentence consists of a clause plus an LDP phrase.
Other languages provide direct morphosyntactic evidence for the PCS-
LDP distinction. In Tzotzil (Aissen 1987), for example, the contrast is
marked both intonationally and morphologically. This is exemplified in 4.

Tzotzil is VOS, and question words occur in immediately preverbal posi­

tion, as in (b) and (c); there is no pause following them. An NP may also

occur in this position, as in (d). This immediately pre verbal position is the

PCS. An LDP phrase is both set off by a pause and marked by the "topic