Abstract
In this paper, we focus on the relation between Czech syntactic constructions Bees are swarming in the garden –- The garden is swarming with bees. We refer to this relation as a lexical-semantic conversion.
This lexical-semantic conversion is associated with changes in the correspondence between two situational participants –- Bearer of action and Location –- and valency complementations. These changes result in a permutation of these participants which affects the prominent surface syntactic position of subject.
We demonstrate that whereas the first syntactic variant refers to a simple action, the latter expresses rather a state arising from this simple action. In the latter case, the participant Location is usually holistically interpreted.
We assume that the holistic ef- fect of this participant follows from the fact that a state is generally attributed to each participant expressed in the subject position as a whole. Furthermore, syntactic variants with formal subject “to” and subjectless construc