Semantic Macroroles in Role and Reference Grammar

Issues regarding the nature of the semantic relationships holding between a verb (or other predicating element) and its arguments have been the focus of much research and controversy since the mid-1960’s. Starting from Gruber (1965)’s notion of thematic relations and Fillmore (1968)’s concept of case roles, most contemporary theories of grammar assume some system of semantic predicate-argument relations. Most theories assume a set of thematic relations such as agent, patient, theme, instrument, etc. which map into a set of grammatical relations (e.g. Lexical-Functional Grammar) or structural positions in clauses (Government & Binding Theory). Role and Reference Grammar [RRG] (Van Valin 1993, in press; Van Valin & LaPolla 1997) has taken a somewhat different approach to this aspect of the syntax-semantics interface. In some of the earliest work in the theory (Van Valin 1977), it was proposed that there are two types of semantic relationships holding between predicates and their arguments: the familiar thematic relations like agent, experiencer, patient, etc., as well as a second, more general type of semantic role, of which there are only two, termed actor and undergoer. The latter type of role was labelled semantic macroroles. Originally unique to RRG, this notion has been picked up and developed in different ways in a variety of approaches.1 The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the RRG concept of semantic macrorole. The discussion will proceed as follows. In the next section, the semantic basis of the distinction between actor and undergoer will be clarified, and in the following section, the function of semantic macroroles in the RRG linking system will be discussed. In the final section, the issue of how many macroroles there should be will be addressed.