This paper discusses Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), which is a structuralist-formalist theory of grammar. RRG grew out of an attempt to answer two fundamental questions: (1) what would linguistic theory look like if it were based on the analysis of Lakhota, Tagalog, and Dyirbal, rather than on the analysis of English?; and (2) how can the interaction of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in different grammatical systems best be captured and explained? It is suggested here that RRG illustrates one possible answer to these questions, and that it shows that it is possible to have a rigorous, typologically-sensitive grammatical theory that takes semantics and pragmatics as central features. It has attempted to deal not only with the issues that have interested typologists and functionalists. Recent work has proposed a functional account of subjacency that relies crucially on interactions among the linking system, focus structure, and syntactic structure. (JL)