Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

74 ROBERT D. VAN VALIN, JR.

Finite verb agreement in Icelandic is with the highest ranking direct
core macrorole argument, with the same hierarchy that case marking refers
to. In English, in which non-macrorole dummies trigger agreement, finite
verb agreement is with the pivot, which, except for the dummies, is the
highest ranking direct core macrorole. The same hierarchy for agreement
operates in Georgian, in which V-class agreement is a property of the high­
est ranking direct core macrorole, with M-class agreement coding the
remaining direct core arguments. (See Van Valin 1990a, 1991b for detailed
discussion and exemplification of these agreement systems.)

5. Linking syntactic and semantic representations in simple clauses

5.1 General considerations

The various components of a description of grammatical structure have

been presented (clause structure, lexical representation and semantic roles,

syntactic functions, focus structure), and now the principles that link them

together will be presented. The linking algorithm is central to a theory like

RRG that posits only one level of syntactic representation, for it must be

able to deal not only with canonical clause patterns, i.e. those in which the

default correlations between syntactic and semantic structure exist, but also

with the non-canonical patterns that motivated the use of syntactic transfor­

mations and multiple levels of syntactic representation in the first place.

The general linking schema in RRG may be sketched as in Figure 16. The

relation between LS and thematic relations is given in the definitions of

thematic relations in terms of LS argument positions in Table 4, while the

relation between thematic relations and macroroles is mediated by the uni­

versal hierarchy in (25). The relation between macroroles (and non-mac­

rorole arguments of the verb) and morphosyntactic functions is subject to

extensive cross-linguistic variation and is affected by hierarchies such as

those in (39) and by the extent to which focus structure is grammaticalized

in clause-internal relational syntax (cf. 46).

5.2 The general linking algorithm

The linking between semantic and syntactic representations is governed by

a very general constraint, the Completeness Constraint [CC]: all of the