A Frame Analysis of English and Ukrainian Existential Sentences: A Comparative Study

This article provides a contrastive analysis of English and Ukrainian existential sentence patterns as a means of expressing the syntactic concept of existence. The investigation is grounded in the theoretical framework of Charles Fillmore’s Frame Semantics and Marvin Minsky’s frame theory. The paper conceptualizes the existential sentence pattern as a typical proposition in which the predicate requires two mandatory actants (specifically, Patient and Locative) to form a grammatically correct utterance in both English and Ukrainian. Employing both frame modelling and comparative methods, the author compares the ‘default’ assignments of the ‘Locative slot’ and the ‘Patient slot’ in these languages. The study’s findings indicate that the ‘Locative slot’ has identical ‘default’ assignments in both English and Ukrainian. However, speakers follow different ‘default’ assignments when filling the ‘Patient slot’ with nouns representing specific classes. In English, both singular and plural forms are acceptable, whereas in Ukrainian, the plural is the preferred option.