Categorial Participant of Slovak Semantic Sentence Structure. Sentences of Existence

Abstract

We focus on semantic participants of Slovak Language. These participants are known also as thematic roles, semantic roles or theta roles. In every sentence there are some participants needed for correct syntactic meaning. Our hypothesis is based on premise that one of these participants is categorial and this participant opens the position or positions for other participants. In our opinion categorial participant is fundamental semantic element within specific language micro-situations (existence, possession, information transfer, moving etc.) and every micro-situation has only one such participant. Non-categorial (general) participants can occur within more micro-situations. The paper describes methods for specifying categorial participants. As a model structure we describe elementary sentence structure of existence

Keywords

• linguistics, syntax, semantic structure, thematic role, participant, existence