Radical Role and Reference Grammar (RRRG)

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.