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.

This chapter offers an in-depth treatment of clause linkage and complex sentences in RRG. First, it discusses and exemplifies each nexus–juncture type, adducing evidence from a wide range of languages. Then, it introduces the notion of syntactic and semantic cohesiveness in clause linkage and makes relevant generalizations and predictions.

Chapter 4 will move away from speaking about broad generalizations and focus in on some of the ways intersecting identities affect the experience of various workers. For instance, how does race, religion, class, sexual orientation, and age affect the experiences of workers navigating the structural norms of the workplace? The chapter will also explore the intersection between the two groups of employees this book is primarily focused on—workers who have both a disability and caregiving responsibilities. Most often, these workers are mothers with disabilities.

Chapter 7 first explores the theory behind protecting people with disabilities and workers with caregiving responsibilities. It then explores the practical justifications for protecting these groups of employees. Finally, it explains why my proposals go beyond protecting specific groups of employees and instead protected everyone.

This chapter introduces complex sentences, which are complicated sentences that are formed by a main clause and one or more subordinate clauses, namely, clauses of unequal importance. Five types of common complex sentences are identified in this chapter: causative, concessive, conditional, purposive, and preference. Each type is introduced in terms of specific correlative markers and their meanings and uses.

Tracing the Courts post-racial constitutionalism beginning with the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy to the present by unpacking the rhetorical structure of the Courts race jurisprudence.

Clause combining, or clause linkage, is traditionally analysed on the syntactic, semantic and prosodic (spoken) levels, and the combinations are called complex sentences in many popular grammars. What is widely accepted today is that clause combining or clause linkage should be understood as mechanisms of connecting clauses rather than sentences. Since the clause is the most fundamental grammatical unit, Chapter 5 considers how non-finiteness plays its role in clause combining from the process-relation perspective. Three types of clause relations are proposed: paratactic, circumstantial and participantial. Non-finite clauses act as the bridges in clause combining viewed from the perspective of metaphoric syndrome. Thus, an answer to the third research question (How does non-finiteness function for inter-clausal connectivity?) is provided.

A subordinate clause is one embedded somewhere within another clause. The clause immediately containing it is called its matrix clause and may or may not be the main clause of the whole sentence. Subordinate clauses often differ in their internal structure from main clauses. There are three main types: relative, comparative, and content clauses, the last being the default type.

Relative clauses often include a relative word or a subordinator in marker function and have an anaphoric relation between an element in the clause and one in a containing clause. Often a missing phrase determines the anaphoric relationship. Comparative clauses mostly function as complements to the prepositions ‘than’ or ‘as’ and lack a phrase found in a main declarative clause.

Content clauses may be introduced by a subordinator, such as ‘that’ or ‘whether’, but otherwise differ less radically from main clauses, and indeed are often structurally identical with them. Content clauses function cheifly as complements within the larger construction. Like main clauses, they have declarative, interrogative, and exclamative subtypes. Sometimes, the structure of a subordinate clause is ambiguous between two types.

This chapter summarizes the findings presented in the book. As demonstrated in the preceding chapters, the rise of discourse markers is the result of a more complex process involving two separate mechanisms, namely grammaticalization and cooptation. It is argued that the framework used in the book offers an explanation of why discourse markers have the grammatical properties they do.

Following its incorporation as a permanent joint-stock in 1657, and the institutional and financial stability this brought to the Company, this chapter explores the corporate leadership’s attempts to re-centralise power in the Company and regain control over its servants and settlements in Asia. As the court of committees restructured the Company’s organisation, and sought to erect new regulatory frameworks in Asia that would more effectively realise metropolitan interests by dismissing refractory servants, disrupting transcultural networks and squeezing out private interests, the powerful confederacy of Anglo-Indian elites that controlled Madras violently rebelled against these centralising impulses and seized the city. Although the Company sent a powerful force to recapture Madras, nonetheless the coup de force exposed the reconstituted dynamic of the Company, in which the success of Madras was largely due to the integration of Company servants with surrounding economic and political constituents. The subsequent legalisation of private trade and the restoration of the rebels to their positions of power demonstrated the Company’s future willingness to accommodate the expansive transcultural networks of its servants and their Asian allies. The rebellion of Madras represented the complete decentralisation of the Company by the later seventeenth century, and the critical role played by Indian elites in driving the expansion of the Company.

The Anglo-Mughal War of 1686–1690 is the focus of Chapter 5, which seeks to challenge traditional understandings of the war as the result of a more capable and belligerent Company seeking to impose its will on the Mughal empire and expand its territory and rights by force, culminating in the acquisition of Calcutta. Instead, this chapter places the war within the context of the personal tensions and conflicts produced by the transcultural ties which bound Company servants and Mughal elites together. Some servants sought to renegotiate these increasingly one-sided relationships with a limited show of force, for which they were immediately expelled from Bengal by the Mughal government. Only after ten years of complex negotiations, in which new transcultural relationships were established with an entirely new Mughal regime, could the Company return and develop Calcutta as a settlement. Even then, its expansion relied on the Company’s utility to the new Mughal regime, to which they contributed men and money to uphold the nawab’s authority against several large-scale rebellions. By the turn of the eighteenth century, the Company transformed itself into a key client of the Mughal government which could be mobilised to consolidate the empire’s control of Bengal in exchange for greater rights and privileges.

This chapter shifts the focus onto Bengal, and the various strategies adopted by the Mughal empire in accommodating and subordinating the Company’s growing presence in the province of Bengal. If the integration of Company servants into surrounding communities at Madras and their subordination to the sultanate of Golconda unlocked a range of rights and privileges which allowed them to expand their presence on the Coromandel Coast, the opposite was true in Bengal. The English experience in Bengal represented the Company at its most subordinate, pliant and, indeed, weakest, utterly subservient to the communities, elites and rulers whom they relied on. This situation was compounded by the growth of interloping communities, who were even more effective than Company servants in integrating themselves socially, culturally and commercially with Indian communities and elites, assuming many of the subordinate services that Company servants had traditionally fulfilled. Skilful Mughal governors played these groups off against one another, utilising interloping and Company networks for their own benefit, without needing to concede any substantial rights or autonomy to either. In maintaining a plural commercial environment, Mughal elites ensured their place at the top of local hierarchies of wealth and power.

Borges was partial to Kafka’s short stories, reading forty one of them in the versions edited by Max Brod. On Kafka, he put forth a view that was largely biographical and religious. Borges saw the Book of Job as about the enigma of the universe, and he read Kafka’s stories as modern-day versions of Job: stories about stoicism, suffering, and the inscrutable character of God and the universe. Borges authored (or co-authored) translations of eighteen of Kafka’s texts, and the influence of Kafka is clearly visible in key stories of the 1940s - cf. ’The Library of Babel’, ’The Lottery in Babylon’, and ’The Secret Miracle’, the latter of these being about the relationship between man and God..

Rhetorical silences are not created equal. To determine the import of the unsaid, the power differential of gender (as conceptualized by gender theory) is methodologically indispensable. “Masculinity” and “femininity,” concepts related to presumptions of domination and subordination, affect the rhetorical function of the unsaid. Permitted-to-speak bodies are often already empowered; for them, the unsaid denotes and maintains their masculinist power. Subordinate bodies, from whom silence is expected, perform simply another iteration of a regulatory, disciplinary norm that considers them feminine or weak. Nevertheless, the gendering of dominant and subordinate roles does not erase the subversive possibilities of the unsaid. The masculine unsaid may be stripped of its power if an alternative hierarchy is introduced to challenge tacit assumptions of dominance. Meanwhile, the feminine unsaid may become a tool that defies hegemonic power structures by using the unsaid as a tactic for conveying forbidden ideas, stubbornly communicating the unsayable. Categories of the “masculine” unsaid, the subordinate unsaid, and the resistant unsaid offer valuable classifications for developing a comprehensive methodology of the unsaid. Yet these categories are not comprehensive within themselves or neatly discrete from one another. Rather, they are permeable, in constant engagement and renegotiation with one another.