ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the ‘propositional structure’ of the sentence. The propositional structure relates to the type of ‘state’ or ‘action’ described by the sentence and the ‘participant roles’ involved in the state or action. The term ‘participants’ is used when referring to constituents of place and time. The sorts of processes and participants identified are probably common to all languages, though their syntactic realization differs from language to language. Action and state verbs fall into a number of different subclasses. The chapter discusses two other subclasses of action verbs: inchoative and causative-inchoative verbs. Propositions with inchoative verbs describe an entity changing from one state to another; propositions with causative-inchoative verbs describe one entity acting on another so as to make it change state. The different classes of verbs take different types and numbers of participants.
