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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]
In these languages, a verb is typically in the active voice when the subject of the verb is the doer of the action. In active voice, the subject of the sentence performs the action expressed by the main verb and is thus the agent. For example, in the sentence "The cat ate the fish", 'the cat' is the agent performing the action of eating. [1]
Agent deliberately performs the action (e.g. Bill ate his soup quietly). The actions can be both conscious or unconscious. In syntax, the agent is the argument of a transitive verb that corresponds to the subject in English. Experiencer the entity that receives sensory or emotional input (e.g. Susan heard the song. I cried). Stimulus
The following pair of examples illustrates the contrast between active and passive voice in English. In sentence (1), the verb form ate is in the active voice, but in sentence (2), the verb form was eaten is in the passive voice. Independent of voice, the cat is the Agent (the doer) of the action of eating in both sentences. The cat ate the mouse.
In linguistics, an agent noun (in Latin, nomen agentis) is a word that is derived from another word denoting an action, and that identifies an entity that does that action. [1] For example, driver is an agent noun formed from the verb drive .
Active–stative (or simply active): The argument (subject) of an intransitive verb can be in one of two cases; if the argument is an agent, as in "He ate", then it is in the same case as the agent (subject) of a transitive verb (sometimes called the agentive case), and if it is a patient, as in "He tripped", then it is in the same case as the ...
Different languages use different methods for expressing the agent in passive clauses. In Swedish, the agent can be expressed by means of a prepositional phrase with the preposition av (equivalent here to the English "by"). The Austronesian language Kimaragang Dusun also indicates passive voice by verb conjugation using the infix, in . [3]
The passive voice is a specific grammatical construction. The essential components, in English, are a form of the stative verb be (or sometimes get [4]) and the past participle of the verb denoting the action. The agent (the doer of the action) may be specified using a prepositional phrase with the preposition by, but this is optional. [5]