Yes, in both these examples the boat is the patient, because it is acted on by John. So the patient role applies to the person or thing who has the action of a ‘doing’ verb done to them. It doesn’t refer to a patient in the medical sense (although it is a bit like the role of a medical patient having tests and treatments done to them by others). This is the role of being acted upon by an agent. So looking at semantic roles is useful in thinking about alternative ways to describe the same situation.Īnother important semantic role is patient.
The same situation might be described in a number of different ways. Semantic roles indicate the parts played by participants in ‘a state of affairs’ or ‘a situation’. Although we have changed an active clause into a passive one, and the boat is now the Subject, nothing has changed in the real world.
Who or what is the agent in the following clause? So John is the agent in the following example: The agent is the ‘doer’ of an action described by a ‘doing’ verb. The most obvious semantic role is called the agent. These people and things are referred to by the parts of the clause in a way that tells us what their roles are. They concern the roles that people and things play externally, in the real world.
The terms Subject and Object are called functions: they explain the grammatical role played by a particular element in the clause. We might also say that John is the Subject and the boat is the Direct Object of the clause (or sentence in this case). More specificallty, we say that it is a verb in the past tense. We can say that steered in the following example has a grammatical form, namely verb. When we talk about grammar, we mostly discuss language from the point of view of its internal characteristics.
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