Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

A SYNOPSIS OF ROLE AND REFERENCE GRAMMAR 65

(46) a. Syntactic pivot [+pragmatic influence]: the selection of the

argument to function as pivot of a transitive verb is not pre­

dictable from its semantic role and may be influenced by dis­

course-pragmatic considerations, in particular its topicality.

Such a pivot will be called a pragmatic pivot [PrP].

b. Syntactic pivot [-pragmatic influence] : the selection of the

argument to function as pivot of a transitive verb is predicta­

ble from its semantic role, which is determined by the lexical

semantic properties of the verb. Such a pivot will be called a

semantic pivot [SmP].

As mentioned earlier, whether a pivot is [±pragmatic influence] can only
be determined by looking at clauses with transitive verbs, since there is no
choice with respect to which argument will be pivot with an intransitive
verb. It is crucial to realize that the issue with respect to whether a pivot is
semantic or pragmatic is not whether the pivot itself is pragmatically salient
or not; in the topic chain in (44) the pivot is the primary topical participant,
and in the switch-reference chain in (46) the pivot is the primary topical
participant in all but two of the clauses. Hence the pivots in both construc­
tions are highly topical. Rather, the issue is whether these pragmatic con­
siderations are a factor in the clause-internal syntactic process of selecting
the argument to function as pivot, and here Tepehua and Yagaria differ
dramatically: in Tepehua they may affect the selection of the pivot argu­
ment, while in Yagaria they cannot.
The distribution of pivot types may now be restated in terms of the
definitions in (46). SmPs are the unmarked pivot type, and every language
which has syntactic pivots has at least one construction which has a SmP.
PrPs are the marked, distributionally restricted pivot type, and they are
found in some but not all languages; moreover, languages which have con­
structions with a PrP also have constructions with a SmP.^40

4.5 Other syntactic functions

It was stated in section 4.1 that RRG does not posit any clause-internal syn­

tactic relations beyond syntactic pivot, and therefore there are no relations

akin to the traditional notions of direct or indirect object in RRG. "Direct

object" is by far the more important of the two relations, and the motiva­

tion for postulating such a relation in multistrata! theories like GB and