In linguistics, a grammatical agent is the participant of a situation that carries out the action in this situation. Linguistics is the scientific study of Language, encompassing a number of sub-fields In Philosophy, action has developed into a sub-field called Philosophy of action. Also, agent is the name of the thematic role (also known as the thematic relation) with the above definition. In Linguistics, thematic relations express the meaning that a Noun phrase plays with respect to the action or state described by a sentence's verb The word comes from a participle of the Latin verb agere, to do.
Typically, the situation is denoted by a sentence, the action by a verb in the sentence, and the agent by a noun phrase. In Linguistics, a sentence is a grammatical unit of one or more words bearing minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it often preceded and followed For English usage of verbs see the wiki article English verbs. In grammatical theory, a noun phrase (abbreviated NP) is a Phrase whose head is a Noun or a Pronoun, optionally accompanied
For example, in the sentence "Jack kicked the ball", Jack is the agent. In certain languages, the agent is declined or otherwise marked to indicate its grammatical role. In Linguistics, declension (or declination) is the occurrence of Inflection in Nouns Pronouns and Adjectives indicating In Japanese, for instance, the agent is typically affixed with |ga| (the hiragana が). is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities is a Japanese Syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system, along with Katakana and Kanji; the Latin alphabet Although Modern English does not mark grammatical role, agency is informally represented using certain conventions; for instance, with the morphemes "-ing", "-er", or "-or", as in "eating", "user", or "prosecutor". English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States In Morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. (Cf. agent noun. In Linguistics, an agent noun (or nomen agentis) is a word that is derived from another word denoting an action, and that identifies an entity that does )
The notion of agency is easy to grasp intuitively but notoriously difficult to define: typical qualities that a grammatical agent often has are that it has volition, is sentient or perceives, causes a change of state, or moves. The linguist David Dowty included these qualities in his definition of a Proto-Agent, and proposed that the nominal with the most elements of the Proto-Agent and the fewest elements of the Proto-Patient tends to be treated as the agent in a sentence[1]. David Dowty is a linguist known primarily for his work in semantic and syntactic theory and especially in Montague grammar and Categorial grammar This solves problems that most semanticists have with deciding on the number and quality of thematic roles. For example, in the sentence His energy surprised everyone, His energy is the agent, even though it does not have most of the typical agent-like qualities such as perception, movement, or volition.
The grammatical agent is often confused with the subject, but these two notions are quite distinct: the former is based explicitly on its relationship to the verb, whereas the latter is based on the flow of information, word order, and importance to the sentence. According to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle, every sentence can be divided in two main constituents, one being the subject of the sentence and the For English usage of verbs see the wiki article English verbs. In Discourse -based grammatical theory information flow is any tracking of referential information by speakers In a sentence such as "The boy kicked the ball", "the boy" is the agent and the subject. However, when the sentence is rendered in the passive voice, "The ball was kicked by the boy", "the ball" is the grammatical subject, but "the boy" is still the agent. In Grammar, the voice (also called gender or diathesis of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state that the verb expresses and the participants identified Many sentences in English and other Indo-European languages have the agent as subject.
References
- ^ Dowty, David. 1991. "Thematic proto-roles and argument selection", Language, 67. 3:547-619
Dapyx Software network: MP3 Explorer | Ebook Manager | Zenithic