The categories of concepts that most often manifest themselves as grammatical categories in linguistic structure are, in the first place, the categories of the empathy hierarchy:

The category of abstract concepts is further subdivided; s. below.

The functions occupied by participants of a situation are semantic roles, which may manifest themselves in syntactic functions, which in turn may be specified semantically by case relators. The following tables illustrates the most important semantic roles:

¹ Attention: theme ≠ neutral and ≠ moved object !

The category of an entity is a basic property determining its nature. The participant function is a relation that the entity contracts contingently, as a participant of a particular situation. The same entity may carry different participant functions in different situations. In principle, therefore, categories may combine freely with functions. For instance, the entity Linda, figuring in the situations designated by and , is, at any rate, of the category ‘human’ and takes the agent role in , but the recipient role in .

This may look as if the combination of categories with functions produced a complete cross-classification which might characterize the participants of a situation. There are, however, dependencies and default associations of categories and functions. The default category for a given function is mentioned by “typically” in the roles table. Some of these are so overwhelming that they take the form of a dependency, and this may even be mutual. For instance, agents are animate beings. If an inanimate being seemingly takes an agentive role, this is the role of the force, which in some languages requires distinct coding.

Places are another clear case of this interdependence. The default function of a place in a situation is one of the local functions (ablative, allative and essive); and vice versa, what bears any of these functions in a situation is, with more than chance probability, a place. In Yucatec Maya, the verb bin ‘go’ takes an allative complement. If this is of the category ‘place’, its role is not marked (). Otherwise, a suitable preposition marks the local function (; Yuc. iknal ~ French chez).

To account for more dependencies of this kind, the category ‘abstract’ of the empathy hierarchy must be specified for two subcategories, viz. time and manner. Regarding now the categories of place, time and manner together, the following defaults obtain:

• Places function as local components.
• Time points and periods function as temporal components.
• Manners function as modal components.

Whenever an element of such a category fulfills its default function, formal marking may be reduced. Either the category or the function or both may remain uncoded. The same principle of coding parsimony obtains in the formation of subordinate clauses. A subordinate clause which by itself designates a place, time or manner does not need a specific subordinator to mark its local, temporal or modal function. And vice versa, if there is an interpropositional relator to indicate one of these functions, the clause itself may remain without a coded orientation to a local, temporal or manner participant.

The sentences of contain temporal adjuncts. In a, the function of the temporal noun is marked by a preposition. With other subcategories of temporal nouns, such a marking need not happen, as shown by #b. The subordinate clause in #c is oriented towards its temporal adjunct, so it designates a point in time, and its relation to the main clause remains unmarked.

The interdependence of category and function is particularly clear for ‘manner’: not by chance, the same term designates both the category and the function.