Robert D. Van Valin (born February 1, 1952) is the principal writer behind Role and Reference Grammar, a functional theory of grammar encompassing syntax, semantics and discourse pragmatics, which is connected to other functional theories, like S. Dik's Functional Grammar, and also to the cognitive linguistics field pioneered by Ronald Langacker. His 1997 monograph Syntax: structure, meaning and function is an attempt to provide a method for syntactic analysis which is just as relevant for languages like Dyirbal and Lakhota as it is for more commonly studied Indo-European languages. Instead of positing a rich innate and universal syntactic structure (see Universal Grammar), Van Valin suggests that the only truly universal parts of a sentence are its nucleus, generally a predicating element such as a verb or adjective, and the arguments, normally noun phrases, that the nucleus requires. Van Valin also departs from Chomskyan syntactic theory by denying the universality of the verb phrase.
He works at the Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf.