This chapter proposes a functional theory of language acquisition based on the idea that children utilize their understanding of cognitive and communicative principles to construct a grammar that integrates semantic and pragmatic notions. The chapter explores child language data that are relevant to such issues as how layered clause structure, operator projection, predicate structure and grammatical relations are acquired within a communication-and-cognition framework. In showing how the language acquisition data map to the Role and Reference Grammar framework, the chapter includes contrasts with alternative theories, such as autonomous syntax theory. From the perspective of conceptual development, the infant-toddler is viewed as a relatively proficient information processor with the capacity to discover fundamental linguistic relationships, in the spirit of the theory of Operating Principles (Slobin 1985).

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.

After introducing the aims and scope of the Handbook, this chapter reflects on the contribution of Role and Reference Grammar to modern linguistic theory, highlighting the key features which uniquely characterize this framework and distinguish it from others.

Finally, Chapter 11 is concerned with alternating pairs of constructions, such as active and passive clauses and singular and plural nouns, which are commonly analyzed as paradigmatic alternatives of particular grammatical categories such as voice and number. Crucially, paradigmatic alternatives of this type are often asymmetrical in the sense that the less frequent member of an alternating pair of constructions is marked by an extra morpheme (e.g., a voice or number marker). Linguistic typologists refer to this asymmetry by the notion of markedness and have argued that frequency accounts for the occurrence of the extra marker. Chapter 11 presents a network analysis of the encoding asymmetries of grammatical categories based on research from typology and psycholinguistics. While the proposed account applies to a large number of categories (e.g., voice, number, tense, aspect, case), the chapter is primarily concerned with a phenomenon known as differential object marking, which has played a key role in recent typological and psycholinguistic research on grammatical relations.

Every construction has a particular ecological location in the grammar network that is defined by its relationship to other constructions in the system. Since the relationships between constructions are similar to those between lexemes, Chapter 10 begins with a short discussion of psycholinguistic research on the mental lexicon, which is commonly analyzed as an activation network (Dell 1986). There is abundant evidence that lexical access is influenced by several interacting factors including frequency, priming, similarity and neighborhood density, or family size. Considering research on sentences processing, L1 acquisition and language change, the chapter argues that the availability, or accessibility, of constructions is influenced by the same factors as lexical access, that is, by frequency, priming, similarity and neighborhood density, supporting the hypothesis that lexemes and constructions are organized in similar ways. Specifically, the chapter argues that grammar includes “construction families” that influence the use and the development of syntactic patterns (Diessel and Tomasello 2005; Wells et al. 2009).