This chapter deals with lexical and grammatical categories in Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). First, it discusses a range of functionally motivated, non-endocentric syntactic categories, such as the nucleus (NUC), containing the predicate, referential phrases (RPs) and modifying phrases (MPs). Although these units are typically realized by verbs, nouns and adjectives/adverbs, respectively, this is not always so, and many languages allow for non-verbal predicates, non-adjectival modifying phrases, etc., while other languages show little to no evidence for categories such as noun, verb or adjective. This is captured in RRG by assuming that NUC, RP and MP are not universally linked to particular lexical categories. The chapter also discusses grammatical categories which are referred to in RRG as operators, and which ground the clause, core or nucleus (TAM markers, evidentials, etc.), as well as categories which are primarily concerned with questions of reference, such as number, definiteness, deixis, etc., which ground the RP.

The past twenty years have brought a revolution in the understanding of how the human brain accomplishes language comprehension, as more sophisticated models have been proposed in response to the discovery of brain regions in the left hemisphere other than Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas involved in syntactic and semantic processing. Nevertheless, some old mysteries remain unsolved. One of these is the surprising finding that some split-brain patients have some linguistic abilities in their isolated right hemisphere, including, for a few, the ability to make grammaticality judgements. If the neural machinery for syntactic processing is found exclusively in the left hemisphere, this should not be possible. This paper proposes an account of this unexpected phenomenon using the grammatical tools of Role and Reference Grammar, and the solution has implications for the theory itself as well as for another old mystery, namely the ability of some aphasics, who cannot correctly interpret reversible passives, to nevertheless judge the grammaticality of sentences.

After introducing the aims and scope of the Handbook, this chapter reflects on the contribution of Role and Reference Grammar to modern linguistic theory, highlighting the key features which uniquely characterize this framework and distinguish it from others.

The goal of this chapter is to present RRG as a formalized grammatical theory which puts emphasis on mathematical and logical rigour. It is shown how the syntactic dimension of RRG can be formally expressed as a tree rewriting grammar consisting of elementary tree templates that can be combined with larger syntactic units by three modes of composition: substitution, adjunction and wrapping. Special attention is given to the structure and derivation of extraction constructions and complex sentences.

Chapter 1 presents the purpose of the book – i.e. describing how a text-based description of three world languages can be developed. The Systemic Functional Linguistic theory informing these descpriptons is introduced, including modellng of context and discourse semantics,and the basic theoretical parameters of metafunciton, rank and stratification.The nature argumentation in relation to grammar description is outlined.

Chapter 3 explores verbal group system and structure. In doing so for English and Spanish, it concentrates on what in SFL is referred to as univariate structure. Univariate structures are structures involving a single variable, which is repeated over and over again; they thus function as the realisation of recursive systems. The unit complexes introduced above (clause complexes, group complexes, word complexes and morpheme complexes) are structures of this kind. And some languages develop more delicate clause and group systems organised along these lines. The recursive tense systems in English and Spanish which we describe in this chapter are good examples. Chinese verbal groups on the other hand do not involve recursive systems realised by iterating structures and so have to be approached from a multivariate perspective.

Chapter 2 explores nominal group system and structure. In doing so, it concentrates on what in SFL is referred to as multivariate structure. Multivariate structures are structures involving a finite number of functions, each playing a distinct role. In this chapter we concentrate on developing multivariate structures for nominal groups in English, Spanish and Chinese.

In this invited Afterword Matthiessen positions this volume as the third step in a series of books introducing students and colleagues to Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) – following on from the general introduction in Matthiessen and Halliday (1997/2009) and the introduction to formulating system networks in Martin, Wang and Zhu (2013). It also positions the work on English, Spanish and Chinese in this volume in relation to work on other languages, much of which has been curated and/or mentored by Matthiessen. In addition this afterword reviews a number of key issues arising in relation to language description based on SFL. These include the paradigmatic orientation of system descriptions, cryptogrammatical reasoning, trinocular vision (from about, from roundabout and from below), metafunction (ideational, interpersonal and textual), rank and functional language typology.