Statements: entities with Action as their core

Action is the core of any Statement. Actions as entities (Action types) are treated in the Entities section. Here, we will look at individual instances, that is, on Actions as used in Statements. You will understand how they form the semantic core of Statements - and usually also the core of your research data.

When to create a new statement?

Generally, any clause (segment of text with a verb in a definite form) amounts to a statement. But there is more to do, since when doing a statement-based data collection (such as CASTEMO), you are usually interested in actions that entities enter in, and interactions between entities (such as Persons or Groups). Thus, in addition to explicit clauses, it is recommended to also create a statement for each of the following structures:

• participles ("seing this, she..."; "requisitus de veritate dicenda, ...");
• infinitives ("[he finally decided] to go": this structure is implicitly transparent on who is meant to go, and this "to go" should thus - while receiving a proper mood and mood variant - should thus be transformed into a fully-fledged action);
• eliptic expressions with verbal meaning ("she answered that yes" - this "yes" should be developped into fully-fledged new statements, with Actions at interpretive epistemic level, denoting the content of what was the content of the decision, but not referring syntactically to the previous statements on this as actants of the "answered" statement - as they don't have this syntactic relation in the text - but "copying them" in a proper mood and modality, with only this "that yes" delimited in the text as the span of all of these statements).

Event, or Statement?

Events and Statements can work in synonymic ways, but when coding a text, follow the wording:

• for verbal expressions and their eliptic expressions (such as "Peter was baptized by a priest"), use a Statement;
• for nominal expressions (such as "baptism of Peter by a priest"), use an Event.

The Action-Event Equivalent (AEE) Relation is there to ensure full translatability between the verbal (Statement) and nominal (Event) rendering, you only need to be sure to include this in your queries and data transformation scripts.