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Robert Van Valin
Robert D. Van Valin Jr. (born February 1, 1952) is an American linguist and the principal researcher behind the development of Role and Reference Grammar, a functional theory of grammar encompassing syntax, semantics, and discourse pragmatics. His 1997 book (with Randy J. LaPolla) ''Syntax: structure, meaning and function'' is an attempt to provide a model for syntactic analysis which is just as relevant for languages like Dyirbal and Lakhota as it is for more commonly studied Indo-European languages. Instead of positing a rich innate and universal syntactic structure (see Universal Grammar), Van Valin suggests that the only truly universal parts of a sentence are its nucleus, housing a predicating element such as a verb or adjective, and the core of the clause, containing the arguments, normally noun phrases, or adpositional phrase An adpositional phrase is a syntactic category that includes ''prepositional phrases'', ''postpositional phrases'', and ''circumpositional ph ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Role And Reference Grammar
Role and reference grammar (RRG) is a model of grammar In linguistics, grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rul ... developed by William A. Foley and Robert Van Valin, Jr. in the 1980s, which incorporates many of the points of view of current functional grammar theories. In RRG, the description of a sentence in a particular language is formulated in terms of (a) its logical (semantic) structure and communicative functions, and (b) the grammatical procedures that are available in the language for the expression of these meanings. Among the main features of RRG are the use of lexical decomposition, based upon the predicate semantics of David Dowty (1979), an analysis of clause structure, and the use of a set of thematic roles organized into a hierarchy in which the highest-ranking role ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |