Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

312 LAURA Α. MICHAELIS

based upon Role and Reference Grammar [RRG]. It will become evident
that an adequate explanation of irregular case-marking in Latin requires
reference not only to verb transitivity (or the lack of it) but also to Aktion­
sart classes (e.g., states and activities) and their logical representations
("logical structure" [LS]), thematic roles, the "macroroles" of actor and
undergoer, and the linking both of thematic roles to macroroles and of mac­
roroles to grammatical functions. The principle that there exist "marked
linkages" of thematic roles to macroroles, as put forth in Foley & Van Valin
(1984), will be crucial to this account. Further, as will be seen, such an
account also appears to require, for certain sets of predicates, more specific
semantic groupings of verbs than those provided within a typology based
solely upon inherent lexical aspect. Activity predicates denoting use appear
to form such a subclass.
This analysis will be organized into four sections. In the following sec­
tion, a general typology of the Latin verb forms to be analyzed will be pre­
sented, and the questions which these data pose will be discussed. In sec­
tion 2, the RRG analysis of these Latin data will be proposed, in which the
presence of deviant dative case will be explained as the means by which
non-macrorole core arguments are typically coded. The presence of deviant
ablative and genitive object-marking will be motivated as the manifestation
of a marked linking of the locative thematic role to the macrorole of under­
goer. Additionally, two instances of exceptional ablative and genitive case
which are not attributable to this marked linkage will be examined here:
ablative objects of deponent activity verbs and genitive "subjects" of cer­
tain impersonals. Finally, the impersonal passive construction, in its RRG
formulation, will be shown to corroborate the hypothesis that two-place
predicates sanctioning non-accusative objects are indeed intransitive, i.e.,
do not license the undergoer macrorole. In the following section, three pre­
vious analyses of deviant case in Latin, those of Pinkster (to appear, 1985)
and of Jensen (1981), will be compared with the present analysis. In the
final section, the expanatory advantages of the present analysis will be sum­
marized, and consideration will be given to the notion that the RRG linking
algorithm "regularizes" irregular case-marking.