New Perspectives in Role and Reference Grammar

Product Description New Perspectives in Role and Reference Grammar presents a broad picture of current developments in Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), a version of parallel structure grammar with an emphasis on typological adequacy. Since its inception, RRG has been applied to a wide range of languages, in particular to case marking, complex clauses (e.g. control, raising, and serial verb constructions), unaccusativity/unergativity, and the interplay between syntax and information structure. The present book is a continued investigation of the intermodular correspondence in a variety of languages and comprises 13 papers, which not only contribute to the further development of the theory, but also investigate controversial areas of linguistic theory including inflectional and derivational morphology, verbal semantics and argument structure (anticausative and serial verb constructions), the argument-adjunct distinction, an extended typology of complex clauses, the syntax-information structure interface, and interactions between the lexicon and constructions. In addition, three papers illustrate how RRG may be applied to sign languages, language acquisition, and machine translation from Arabic to English. About the Author Wataru Nakamura studied semantics, semiotics, functional syntax, and language typology at Tokyo and Buffalo and received his PhD in Linguistics in 1997 at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He was a Visiting Researcher at Carnegie Mellon University from 2001 2002 and since 2006 has been an Associate Professor at the Center for the Advancement of Higher Education and Graduate School of International Cultural Studies at Tohoku University, Japan.