Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Patient (grammar) In linguistics, the grammatical patient, also called the target or undergoer, is a semantic role representing the participant of a situation upon whom an action is carried out, [1] or the thematic relation such a participant has with an action. Sometimes, theme and patient are used to mean the same thing. [2]
The word patient originally meant 'one who suffers'. This English noun comes from the Latin word patiens, the present participle of the deponent verb, patior, meaning 'I am suffering,' and akin to the Greek verb πάσχειν (paskhein, to suffer) and its cognate noun πάθος (pathos). This language has been construed as meaning that the ...
A passive voice construction is a grammatical voice construction that is found in many languages. [1] In a clause with passive voice, the grammatical subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb – that is, the person or thing that undergoes the action or has its state changed. [2] This contrasts with active voice, in which the ...
Thematic relation. In certain theories of linguistics, thematic relations, also known as semantic roles, are the various roles that a noun phrase may play with respect to the action or state described by a governing verb, commonly the sentence's main verb. For example, in the sentence "Susan ate an apple", Susan is the doer of the eating, so ...
The use of some transitive verbs denoting strictly reciprocal events may involve a conflation of agent and subject. In the sentence "John met Sylvia", for example, though both John and Sylvia would equally meet Dowty's definition of a Proto-Agent, the co-agent Sylvia is downgraded to patient because it is the direct object of the sentence. [3]
Greek πτῡ́ω (ptū́ō), to spit up, disgorge; + -σις (-sis), added to verb stems to form abstract nouns or nouns of action, result or process hemoptysis, the spitting of blood derived from the lungs or bronchial tubes pulmon-, pulmo-of or relating to the lungs: Latin pulmō, a lung pulmonary py-pus: Greek πύον (púon), pus pyometra ...
Linguistic typology. In linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the grammatical relationship between arguments —specifically, between the two arguments (in English, subject and object) of transitive verbs like the dog chased the cat, and the single argument of intransitive verbs like the cat ran away. English has a subject, which merges the ...
t. e. In grammar, the voice (aka diathesis) of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments (subject, object, etc.). [1] When the subject is the agent or doer of the action, the verb is in the active voice. When the subject is the patient, target or ...