This chapter presents the fundamental theoretical principles of Role and Reference Grammar. The exposition does not presuppose any previous familiarity with RRG, and it ties in with the relevant chapters in the Handbook. After a discussion of theoretical assumptions, the theory of syntactic structure, including clauses, phrases and words, is presented in detail, with new data not found in previous expositions of the theory. The presentation includes the structure of both simple and complex sentences. The next major section concerns semantic representation, and this includes the representation of simple clauses, semantics roles and interclausal semantic relations. There follows a very short mention of the notion of information structure; the reader is referred to two other chapters which present these ideas in detail. The final section concerns the linking between syntax and semantics in simple and complex sentences. The issue of representing language-specific vs. cross-linguistically valid grammatical information is a major theme of this section. RRG’s approach involving constructional schemata is quite distinct from that of mainstream construction grammar.

The RRG approach to information structure (IS) was laid out by Bentley (Chapter 11), and the linking between syntax and semantics was explicated by Van Valin (Chapter 1), Watters (Chapter 6), Guerrero (Chapter 14) and Paris (Chapter 15). These discussions did not emphasize the role of IS in linking, and it is to this topic that we turn in this chapter. We begin by presenting the representation of IS in the layered structure of the clause, and then we show how context can be represented using a version of Discourse Representation Theory and the different focus types derived from these representations. The next section illustrates the importance of IS for the analysis of grammatical phenomena, and this is followed by an analysis of conjunction reduction, which presented problems for an RRG analysis in purely syntactic terms. Finally, the interaction of IS and the linking algorithm will be explored, showing that IS interacts with it in important ways.

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.