Statements

Structure and purpose

Statements model the syntactic structure and semantics of clauses. They have a quadruple structure with action slot and three actant slots: subject, actant1, and actant2. The semantic core is the action slot, which holds the predicate of the clause, and is linked to actants as defined by the syntactic valency of the Action type used, up to trivalent verbs (for instance, ‘Peter received a gift from Elisabeth’). Any Action Type can define through its syntactic valency that an actant is required, optional, or forbidden (required empty).

While InkVisitor can be used for classical entity–relationship modelling done in any database, the CASTEMO data collection workflow is specific in its focus on modelling textual clauses through statements. In this sense, it is a statement-based data collection workflow. This allows texts to be comprehensively modelled, either selectively (based on what is relevant for specific research) or in entirety. CASTEMO is intended to keep the order of appearance and contextual embeddedness of information in the text.

Action attributes

Actant attributes

Pseudo-actant