n.(RRG) A theory of grammar developed by William Foley and Robert Van Valin in the 1980s, incorporating a number of insights gained by functionally oriented linguists. RRG is a functional grammar in senses 1 and 2 of that term; it is formulated in terms of the communicative purposes which need to be served and the grammatical devices which are available to serve those purposes. Among its distinguishing characteristics are a variety of lexical decomposition based upon the Montague-style predicate semantics of Dowty (1979), an analysis of clause structure in terms of layering (sense 1), mapping from ‘logical’ structures into monostratal syntactic representations and the use of a set of participant roles organized into a hierarchy from which the highest-ranking available role in a clause assumes the special superordinate role of actor and a second argument, if present, may assume the superordinate role of undergoer.
RRG is unusual among theories of grammar in the extent to which it is structured to provide equal treatment for the grammars of languages which are very different from English: such phenomena as non-configurationality, verb serialization, split ergativity and switch-reference systems receive analyses which are no less natural than analyses of the facts of English. Like most functional theories of grammar, however, RRG has (so far, at least) received comparatively little formalization. The most comprehensive presentation is Foley and Van Valin (1984); convenient brief introductions are Van Valin and Foley (1980) and Van Valin (1991).
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