Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

ARGUMENT LINKING IN DERIVED NOMINALS 387

d. What did Gray destroy (at the White House) yesterday?
e. Yesterday, who destroyed the court summons at the White
House?
f. Who destroyed the court summons at the White House (yester­
day)?
(12) Deletable LDP NPs in the Nominal
a. Gray's destruction of the court summons yesterday
b. the destruction of the court summons (by Gray) yesterday
c. yesterday's destruction of the court summons by Gray
d. the destruction of the court summons by Gray (yesterday)
e. the city's destruction (= process vN)
f. the destruction (= result vN: "rubble").
Although nominal and sentential LDP phrases are similar in being
grammatically optional, they differ in other ways. For example, only the
sentence is free to topicalize peripheral adverbial PPs like at the White
House; since the prenominal genitive 's can only mark NPs, PPs cannot be
topicalized in the vNP's LDP:

(13) a. the destruction of the court summonsPP [at the White House]

yesterday

b. *pp [at the White House]'s destruction of the court summons

yesterday.

A second difference between English clausal and nominal LDPs is that

while certain vN arguments may occur as detatched NPs (cf. discussion in

2.3.4), verbal arguments can never occur as detatched NPs.^13

2.2.4 Previewing the proposed analysis

Several aspects of RRG theory which have been discussed up to this point

should now make the analytical differences between RRG and purely syn­

tactic approaches self-evident: RRG defines its single level of syntactic rep­

resentation in terms of structural layers; it distinguishes between the poten­

tial number of direct core arguments which can occur in the clause with Vs

and in the nominal with vNs; it assumes that the single direct argument of

the vN occurs in an [of NP] position following the vN head; and it associates

the prenominal NP with a topic function and a left-detached syntactic posi­

tion rather than with either a clausal or NP-specific GR. Obviously, RRG's

treatment of the correlation between verbally-related clausal and nominal

constructions in no way resembles the "abstract- structures, X'-syntax"