Subject in Russian Models that Convey Information about Elemental Forces of Nature and their Semantic Component Being Active (+/-)
The paper investigates into the semantic structure that features elemental forces being predicative actants. The studу proves relevant as the semantic structure with an elemental agent corresponds to a variety of Russian models - active, passive and impersonal ones. The paper makes a structural and semantic analysis of the models specifying their status within the system of semantic roles with a special focus on the semantic component being active (+/-). The analysis is based on a sample of Russian sentences collected from the Russian National Corpus. The complex research procedure features hypothesis-deduction method (with semantic experiment as its integral part), corpus-based experiment and the analysis of search engine results. The paper 1) determines the status of elemental forces of nature as Causers within the typology of actants; 2) describes the criteria applied to collect the empirical data from the Russian National Corpus; 3) makes a structural and semantic analysis of the models that convey information about elemental forces of nature. The findings contribute to the development of the functional approach to linguistics «from semantic structures to linguistic means», i. e. «from meaning to form».