Correlation of Semantic and Syntactic Structure in Material Process Sentences
Correlation of Semantic and Syntactic Structure in Material Process Sentences

Summary/Abstract: In terms of semantics, every proposition describes an event or state in which a number of participants are involved. The Process is central to any proposition. The Process needs a participant causing it to happen. The participant causing a process to happen is called the Agent. Most propositions also include other units of information. Some contain one or more participants which are directly or indirectly affected by the process. These are called the Affected Participants. Some propositions contain units of information serving to describe a participant. These are called Attributes. Finally, some propositions contain units of information serving to give information about the Circumstances in which the Process is happening. The Structure of the sentence can also be described in terms of the Predicate, the Subject, the Objective Complement, the Attributive Adjunct and the Adverbial Adjunct, which are syntactic functions. The most important syntactic function is the Predicate. The Predicate is the principal part of the sentence and its structural centre to which the Subject, the Objective Complement and the Adverbial Adjuncts are linked. Only the Attributive Adjunct is not directly linked to the Predicate. Typically the Process corresponds to the Clause, the Agent to the Subject, the Affected Participant to the Objective Complement, and the Circumstances to the Adverbial Adjunct. The aim of the research under discussion is to discuss how semantic functions can map onto different syntactic functions. To reach the aim the descriptive method was used. Examples were drawn from British National Corpus. The analysis of the material process sentences showed that usually there is no complete one-to one correspondence between the semantic structure and the syntactic structure of the same sentence or between the Agent and the Subject, the Affected Patient and the Objective Complement, the Circumstances and the Adverbial Adjunct.. Semantic functions can map onto different syntactic functions.

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