Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

A SYNOPSIS OF ROLE AND REFERENCE GRAMMAR 59

syntactically accusative languages by means of the marked passive construc­
tion in which the undergoer of a transitive verb is the syntactic pivot. In a
syntactically ergative language such as Dyirbal or Sama (Walton 1986), the
markedness hierarchy for accessibility to the primary syntactic pivot is
reversed: undergoer is the unmarked choice and actor the marked choice.
In these languages an antipassive construction exists which permits the
actor to function as pivot. The two hierarchies are summarized in (39).
(39) a. Hierarchy of markedness of pivot choice: syntactically
accusative languages
Actor > Undergoer > other
b. Hierarchy of markedness of pivot choice: syntactically erga­
tive languages
Undergoer > Actor > other
It is important to realize that these hierarchies apply only to transitive
verbs; since an intransitive verb has only an actor or an undergoer but never
both, the single argument will be pivot, regardless of which macrorole it is.
Note that it makes no sense to talk about accessibility to pivot hierarchies
for Acehnese, because the restrictions refer to actor only, undergoer only,
or any core argument.

4.4 Types of syntactic pivots

Given the existence of the pivot accessibility hierarchies in (39), RRG asks

a question which no other theory has raised: what factors influence the selec­

tion of the argument to be pivot when there is a choice? That is, with a trans­

itive verb, there are in principle two potential pivots, the actor and the

undergoer,^36 and given that a choice must be made as to which one will be

pivot, what factors, syntactic, semantic or pragmatic, govern or at the very

least affect this choice? It is essential to recognize that this issue is only rel­

evant to clauses with transitive verbs; there is no question of choice with an

intransitive verb, since the single argument will function as pivot.

In English, as in many languages, one of the factors influencing pivot

selection is discourse pragmatics. It was shown in section 2.3 that in predi­

cate focus constructions, the unmarked focus type, the syntactic pivot in

English is highly topical, and this suggests that pragmatic factors like topi­

cality could influence the choice of which argument will be pivot in a clause

with a transitive verb. Evidence that this is the case comes from chains of