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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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University of North Dakota

Journal

1993

Linguistics; syntax

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Role And Reference Grammar, Robert D. Van Valin Jr. Jan 1993

Role And Reference Grammar, Robert D. Van Valin Jr.

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

From the introduction: "Role and Reference Grammar [RRG] (Van Valin 1993a) may be termed a "structural-functionalist theory of grammar"; this locates it on a range of perspectives from extreme formalist at one end to radical functionalist at the other. RRG falls between these two extremes, differing markedly from each. In contrast to the extreme formalist view, RRG views language as a system of communicative social action, and consequently, analyzing the communicative functions of morphosyntactic structures has a vital role in grammatical description and theory from this perspective. Language is a system, and grammar is a system in the traditional structuralist …