Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

A SYNOPSIS OF ROLE AND REFERENCE GRAMMAR 19

the verb is interpreted as the absolutive argument, the second as the erga-
tive); changes in the pronominal arguments may require changes in the
position of the full NPs. But because the major grammatical processes can
apply to NP-less clauses of the kind exemplified in (8b), the formulation of
these phenomena need not make any reference to independent NPs at all,
and consequently statements governing the order of the optional NPs are
clearly not central to the working of the grammar. This is in sharp contrast
to the situation in languages like English and Icelandic in which the NPs are
the core arguments, and no statement of grammatical phenomena is possi­
ble without reference to them.

1.7 Adpositional and noun phrase structure

Adpositions come in two basic varieties, predicative and non-predicative.^9
Predicative adpositions function like predicates in that they contribute sub­
stantive semantic information to the clause in which they occur, both in
terms of their own meaning and the meaning of the argument that they
license. A typical example of a predicative adposition would be a peripheral
locative (setting) preposition. Non-predicative adpositions do not add any
substantive semantic information to the clause and do not license the argu­
ment they mark. Rather, their argument is licensed by the predicate, i.e., it
is a core argument; these prepositions are a function of the semantics of the
predicate and are in effect free-morphemic case markers assigned by it.^10
The two types of adposition would be symbolized differently in projec­
tion grammar representations of the LSC. Since non-predicative adposi­
tions mark core arguments, the phrases in which they occur would be PPs
under the ARG node in the core; the adposition would be treated the same
as a case marker, and in particular it would not be considered the head of
the phrase. Predicative adpositions, on the other hand, are the head and
nucleus of the phrase in which they occur, and their object is in fact their
single argument. Both kinds of adpositional phrases occur in Figure 2, and
the internal structure of the argument (non-predicative) PP and the pre­
dicative PP in the LDP is given in Figure 8a. Figure 8b presents the typical
structure of a predicative adpositional phrase in a dependent-marking lan­
guage. The structure is different in a head-marking language like Jacaltec
(Craig 1977), in which the adpositional head bears a morpheme expressing
its argument (object), e.g. y-ul te' rjah (3ERG-UI CL house) "in the house"
[lit. "in-iti the house/']. As with the other head-marking constructions, the