Radical Role and Reference Grammar (RRRG)
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Rolf Kailuweit
Abstract
Starting from the idea of a “holistic approach” (Van Valin 1980) based on text interpretation and communication analysis, the chapter sketches a radical, i.e. back to the roots, remodelling of standard RRG (Van Valin & LaPolla 1997; Van Valin 2005, 2010). It will be shown that a bidirectional linking algorithm (syntax-to-semantics and semantics-to-syntax), no matter how useful it may be for computational implementation, is not an adequate model of human communication. As Van Valin (2006) himself recognizes, the semantic as well as the syntactic representation are already infiltrated by one another. Thus, RRRG will abandon the linking algorithms and instead advocate for three structural levels of different complexity that assumedly function simultaneously: lexical items, syntactic-semantic event templates and construction schemas. As in standard RRG, general rules and principles operate at all levels. In RRG, the most prominent of these principles is the Actor-Undergoer-Hierarchy which is based on actionsart-driven Logical Structures (LS). However, LS prove to be too coarse-grained to describe the different activity degrees material to argument realization. Therefore, a finer-grained Activity Hierarchy will be introduced. The functioning of this centrepiece of RRRG will be illustrated with verbs of emotion (Kailuweit 2005, 2007, 2012a) at the level of lexical items and with anticausative constructions (Kailuweit 2011b, 2012b) at the level of constructional schemas.
Abstract
Starting from the idea of a “holistic approach” (Van Valin 1980) based on text interpretation and communication analysis, the chapter sketches a radical, i.e. back to the roots, remodelling of standard RRG (Van Valin & LaPolla 1997; Van Valin 2005, 2010). It will be shown that a bidirectional linking algorithm (syntax-to-semantics and semantics-to-syntax), no matter how useful it may be for computational implementation, is not an adequate model of human communication. As Van Valin (2006) himself recognizes, the semantic as well as the syntactic representation are already infiltrated by one another. Thus, RRRG will abandon the linking algorithms and instead advocate for three structural levels of different complexity that assumedly function simultaneously: lexical items, syntactic-semantic event templates and construction schemas. As in standard RRG, general rules and principles operate at all levels. In RRG, the most prominent of these principles is the Actor-Undergoer-Hierarchy which is based on actionsart-driven Logical Structures (LS). However, LS prove to be too coarse-grained to describe the different activity degrees material to argument realization. Therefore, a finer-grained Activity Hierarchy will be introduced. The functioning of this centrepiece of RRRG will be illustrated with verbs of emotion (Kailuweit 2005, 2007, 2012a) at the level of lexical items and with anticausative constructions (Kailuweit 2011b, 2012b) at the level of constructional schemas.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction vii
- Controller-controllee relations in purposive constructions 1
- Transitivity, constructions, and the projection of argument structure in RRG 23
- Constructions in RRG 41
- A constructional perspective on clefting in Persian 67
- Radical Role and Reference Grammar (RRRG) 103
- Constructions as grammatical objects 143
- Constructions in Role and Reference Grammar 179
- Towards a model of constructional meaning for natural language understanding 205
- Meaning construction, meaning interpretation and formal expression in the Lexical Constructional Model 231
- Constructions in the Lexical Constructional Model 271
- From idioms to sentence structures and beyond 295
- Index 331
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction vii
- Controller-controllee relations in purposive constructions 1
- Transitivity, constructions, and the projection of argument structure in RRG 23
- Constructions in RRG 41
- A constructional perspective on clefting in Persian 67
- Radical Role and Reference Grammar (RRRG) 103
- Constructions as grammatical objects 143
- Constructions in Role and Reference Grammar 179
- Towards a model of constructional meaning for natural language understanding 205
- Meaning construction, meaning interpretation and formal expression in the Lexical Constructional Model 231
- Constructions in the Lexical Constructional Model 271
- From idioms to sentence structures and beyond 295
- Index 331
