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5 - Grammatical Relations

from Part Two - Topics in RRG: Simple Sentences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2023

By
Randy J. LaPolla
Edited by
Delia Bentley ,
Ricardo Mairal Usón ,
Wataru Nakamura  and
Robert D. Van Valin, Jr
Delia Bentley
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
Ricardo Mairal Usón
Affiliation:
Universidad National de Educación a Distancia, Madrid
Wataru Nakamura
Affiliation:
Tohoku University, Japan
Robert D. Van Valin, Jr
Affiliation:
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
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Summary

This chapter discusses two main aspects of the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) conception of the architecture of grammar: the view that grammatical relations are construction-specific, rather than being global categories of a language and being found in every language, and the function of grammatical relations in referent tracking, which was a major insight in the development (and naming) of the framework. These two aspects of RRG syntax have significantly influenced linguistic theory beyond the RRG framework.

Keywords

grammatical relationscontrollerpivotprivileged syntactic argumentreferent tracking
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Role and Reference Grammar , pp. 269 - 291
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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