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| Grammatical features |
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Syntax relationships |
Inlinguistics, thegrammatical patient, also called thetarget orundergoer, is a semantic role representing the participant of a situation upon whom an action is carried out,[1] or thethematic relation such a participant has with an action.
Sometimes,theme andpatient are used to mean the same thing.[2] When used to mean different things,patient describes a receiver that changes state ("I crushed the car") andtheme describes something that does not change state ("I have the car").[3] By that definition,stative verbs act on themes, anddynamic verbs act on patients.
Typically, the situation is denoted by asentence, the action by averb in the sentence, and the patient by anoun phrase.
For example, in the sentence "Jack ate the cheese",the cheese is the patient. In certain languages, the patient isdeclined forcase or otherwise marked to indicate its grammatical role. InJapanese, for instance, the patient is typically affixed with the particleo (hiragana を) when used with active transitive verbs, and the particlega (hiraganaが) when used with inactive intransitive verbs or adjectives. AlthoughModern English does not mark grammatical role on the noun (it usesword order), patienthood is represented irregularly in other ways; for instance, with themorphemes "-en", "-ed", or "-ee", as ineaten,used, orpayee.[clarification needed]
The grammatical patient is often confused with thedirect object. However, there is a significant difference. The patient is asemantic property, defined in terms of themeaning of a phrase; but the direct object is asyntactic property, defined in terms of the phrase's role in the structure of a sentence. For example, in the sentence "The dog bites the man",the man is both the patient and the direct object. By contrast, in the sentence "The man is bitten by the dog", which has the same meaning but different grammatical structure,the man is still the patient, but now stands as the phrase's subject; andthe dog is only theagent.