Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

A SYNOPSIS OF ROLE AND REFERENCE GRAMMAR 73

core argument status. The inherent lexical content of NPs (Silverstein 1976,
this volume), which is sometimes misleadingly termed "animacy", also
plays an important role in the formulation of case marking rules in many
languages. Agreement rules make primary reference to macroroles,
although here again inherent lexical content may play a role, e.g. in some
languages verbs only agree with animate arguments. In Van Valin
(1990a,b) case marking and agreement rules for Icelandic and Georgian are
proposed. The case-marking rules cover regular (non-idiosyncratic^44 case
marking and are given in (61) and (62); they apply to direct core arguments
only.^45
(61) Case marking rules for Icelandic
a. Highest ranking macrorole takes NOMINATIVE case.
b. The other macrorole argument takes ACCUSATIVE case.
 Non-macrorole arguments take DATIVE as their default case.
(62) Case marking rules for Georgian
a. If a clause contains a single macrorole argument, it is NOMINA­
TIVE.
b. The default case for non-macrorole core arguments is DATIVE.
 The actor macrorole of a verb of class 1 or 3 is ERGATIVE in the
aorist.
The ranking referred to in (61a) is with regard to the hierarchy in (39a).
These rules have been thoroughly motivated and exemplified in Van Valin
(1990a, 1991b), and the arguments will not be repeated here. The idea that
dative is the default case for arguments comes from Silverstein (1980, this
volume). The main point for this discussion is that they make no reference
to grammatical relations of any kind at all; indeed, they do not even refer
directly to the notion of syntactic pivot. This is quite important, because in
both Icelandic and Georgian, as in many languages, the principles deter­
mining the primary syntactic pivot are independent of the case assignment
principles.
In English, case marking rules like those in (61) apply only to pro­
nouns, and the equivalent for lexical NPs is prepositional case marking. As
noted in section 3.3.2, the adpositions that mark oblique core arguments
are not listed in the lexical entry of the verb but rather are predicted by gen­
eral principles. For example, to marks the first argument in the LS config­
uration ...BECOME state'(x,y) when it is not undergoer. This approach to
preposition assignment is sketched in FVV, section 3.3.1 and is developed
further in Jolly (this volume).