18 ROBERT D. VAN VALIN, JR.
arguments of the clause, not the optional independent lexical NPs and pro
nouns. The structure of (8a,b) would thus be those in Figure 7 (the operator
projection is omitted). The structure of (8b) is given in Figure 7a; the sen
tence and clause consist of a single core, which is made up of the nucleus
(the verb stem -pet "carry") and its two arguments, here manifested by the
bound morphemes 0- "3ABS" and s- "3ERG". The aspect prefix ?i- would be
part of the operator projection. The structure of the core is unchanged in
Figure 7b, representing (8a); even though there are NPs in the clause, they
are not the core arguments. (Lokel "away" is a directional operator.)
What, then, is their status? Semantically, their function is to further specify
the reference of the pronominal arguments, which specify only person (and
sometimes number). Syntactically, they are clause-internal and hence are
within the scope of the IF operator; they may therefore be asserted or ques
tioned. However, as argued in Van Valin (1985,1987a), they are irrelevant
to statements of grammatical phenomena, because these phenomena make
reference primarily to the pronominal affixes. In Tzotzil, the construal of
an NP with an argument affix is a function of word order (the first NP after