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Grammatical Agent
In linguistics, a grammatical agent is the thematic relation of the cause or initiator to an event. The agent is a semantic concept distinct from the subject of a sentence as well as from the topic. Whereas the subject is determined syntactically, primarily through word order, the agent is determined through its relationship to the action expressed by the verb. For example, in the sentence "The little girl was bitten by the dog", "girl" is the subject, but "dog" is the agent. The word "agent" comes from the present participle ''agens, agentis'' ("the one doing") of the Latin verb ''agere'', to "do" or "make". Theory Typically, the situation is denoted by a sentence, the action by a verb in the sentence, and the agent by a noun phrase. For example, in the sentence "Jack kicked the ball", ''Jack'' is the agent and "the ball" is the patient. In certain languages, the agent is declined or otherwise marked to indicate its grammatical role. Modern English does not mark the agentive ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguistics is concerned with both the cognitive and social aspects of language. It is considered a scientific field as well as an academic discipline; it has been classified as a social science, natural science, cognitive science,Thagard, PaulCognitive Science, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). or part of the humanities. Traditional areas of linguistic analysis correspond to phenomena found in human linguistic systems, such as syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences); semantics (meaning); morphology (structure of words); phonetics (speech sounds and equivalent gestures in sign languages); phonology (the abstract sound system of a particular language); and pragmatics (how social con ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Volition (linguistics)
In linguistics, volition is a concept that distinguishes whether the subject, or agent of a particular sentence intended an action or not. Simply, it is the intentional or unintentional nature of an action.Tournadre, Nicolas. The Rhetorical Use of the Tibetan Ergative. 1991. Web. Volition concerns the idea of control and for the purposes outside of psychology and cognitive science, is considered the same as intention in linguistics. Volition can then be expressed in a given language using a variety of possible methods. These sentence forms usually indicate that a given action has been done intentionally, or willingly. There are various ways of marking volition cross-linguistically. When using verbs of volition in English, like "want" or "prefer", these verbs are not expressly marked.Hogeweg, Lotte, Helen de Hoop, Andrej Malchukov. Cross-linguistic Semantics of Tense, Aspect and Modality. Linguistics Today. 148 (2009). Print. Other languages handle this with affixes, while other ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thematic Roles .
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Thematic role is a linguistic notion, which may refer to: * Theta role (in syntax or at the syntax-semantics interface), the formal device for representing syntactic argument structure—the number and type of noun phrases—required syntactically by a particular verb * Thematic relation (in semantics), a term to express the role that a noun phrase plays with respect to the action or state described by a governing verb However, it should not be confused with the use of ''thematic'' with reference to the stem ("the theme") of an inflected word, as in thematic vowel In Indo-European studies, a thematic vowel or theme vowel is the vowel or from ablaut placed before the ending of a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word. Nouns, adjectives, and verbs in the Indo-European languages with this vowel are thematic, and tho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Passive Voice
A passive voice construction is a grammatical voice construction that is found in many languages. 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. This contrasts with active voice, in which the subject has the agent role. For example, in the passive sentence "The tree was pulled down", the subject (''the tree'') denotes the patient rather than the agent of the action. In contrast, the sentences "Someone pulled down the tree" and "The tree is down" are active sentences. Typically, in passive clauses, what is usually expressed by the object (or sometimes another argument) of the verb is now expressed by the subject, while what is usually expressed by the subject is either omitted or is indicated by some adjunct of the clause. Thus, turning an active sense of a verb into a passive sense is a valence-decreasing process ("detransitivizi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English Passive Voice
The passive voice in English is a grammatical voice whose syntax is marked by a subject followed by a stative verb complemented by a past participle. For example: :The enemy was defeated. :Caesar was stabbed. In each instance of a passive voice construction, the subject denotes the recipient of the action (the patient) rather than the performer (the agent). The agent may be omitted as evinced in the examples above, or it may be included adjunctively as follows: :The enemy was defeated ''by our troops''. :Caesar was stabbed ''by Brutus''. Conversely, an active voice construction of the foregoing examples yields the following analogues: :Our troops defeated the enemy. :Brutus stabbed Caesar. A form of the verbs ''be'' or ''get'' typically comprises the stative aspect of the English passive voice construction, and the pertinent passive participle is sometimes called a ''passive verb''. English allows a number of passive constructions that are not possible in many of the other lan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Transitive Verbs
A transitive verb is a verb that accepts one or more objects, for example, 'cleaned' in ''Donald cleaned the window''. This contrasts with intransitive verbs, which do not have objects, for example, 'panicked' in ''Donald panicked''. Transitivity is traditionally thought of as a global property of a clause, by which activity is transferred from an agent to a patient. Transitive verbs can be classified by the number of objects they require. Verbs that accept only two arguments, a subject and a single direct object, are monotransitive. Verbs that accept two objects, a direct object and an indirect object, are ''ditransitive'', or less commonly ''bitransitive''. An example of a ditransitive verb in English is the verb ''to give'', which may feature a subject, an indirect object, and a direct object: ''John gave Mary the book''. Verbs that take three objects are ''tritransitive''. In English a tritransitive verb features an indirect object, a direct object, and a prepositional ph ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indo-European Languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish, have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, of which there are eight groups with languages still alive today: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic; and another nine subdivisions that are now extinct. Today, the individual Indo-European languages with the most native speakers are English, Hindi–Urdu, Spanish, Bengali, French, Russian, Portuguese, German, and Punjabi, each with over 100 million native speakers; many others are small and in danger of extinction. In total, 46% of the world's population (3.2 billion people) speaks an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Passive Voice
A passive voice construction is a grammatical voice construction that is found in many languages. 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. This contrasts with active voice, in which the subject has the agent role. For example, in the passive sentence "The tree was pulled down", the subject (''the tree'') denotes the patient rather than the agent of the action. In contrast, the sentences "Someone pulled down the tree" and "The tree is down" are active sentences. Typically, in passive clauses, what is usually expressed by the object (or sometimes another argument) of the verb is now expressed by the subject, while what is usually expressed by the subject is either omitted or is indicated by some adjunct of the clause. Thus, turning an active sense of a verb into a passive sense is a valence-decreasing process ("detransitivizi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Information Flow
In discourse-based grammatical theory, information flow is any tracking of referential information by speakers. Information may be ''new,'' just introduced into the conversation; ''given,'' already active in the speakers' consciousness; or ''old,'' no longer active. The various types of activation, and how these are defined, are model-dependent. Information flow affects grammatical structures such as: *word order (topic, focus, and afterthought constructions). *active, passive, or middle voice. *choice of deixis, such as articles; "medial" deictics such as Spanish ''ese'' and Japanese ''sore'' are generally determined by the familiarity of a referent rather than by physical distance. *overtness of information, such as whether an argument of a verb is indicated by a lexical noun phrase, a pronoun, or not mentioned at all. *Clefting: Splitting a single clause into two clauses, each with its own verb, e.g. ‘The chicken turtles tasted like chicken.’ becomes ‘It was the chicken ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Dowty
David Roach Dowty (born 1945) is a linguist known primarily for his work in semantic and syntactic theory, and especially in Montague grammar and Categorial grammar. Dowty is a professor emeritus of linguistics at the Ohio State University, and his research interests mainly lie in Semantic and Syntactic Theory, Lexical semantics and Thematic roles, Categorial grammar, and Semantics of Tense and Aspect. Life David Dowty received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, with a thesis supervised by Robert Wall and Emmon Bach on the temporal semantics of verbs. Dowty was editor-in-chief of the journal ''Linguistics and Philosophy'' from 1988 to 1992, and associate editor of ''Language''. For several years he was chairman of the Department of Linguistics at the Ohio State University. A one-day symposium was held at the University of Groningen in honour of his sixtieth birthday, subsequently published as ''Theory and Evidence in Semantics''. Major Publications * ''Word Mean ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Agency (philosophy)
Agency is the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment. It is independent of the moral dimension, which is called moral agency. In ''sociology'', an agent is an individual engaging with the social structure. Notably, though, the primacy of structure and agency, social structure vs. individual capacity with regard to persons' actions is debated within sociology. This debate concerns, at least partly, the level of reflexivity (social theory), reflexivity an agent may possess. Agency may either be classified as unconscious, involuntary behavior, or purposeful, goal directed activity (intentional action). An agent typically has some sort of immediate awareness of their physical activity and the goals that the activity is aimed at realizing. In ‘goal directed action’ an agent implements a kind of direct control or guidance over their own behavior. Human agency Agency is contrasted to objects reacting to Natural phenomenon, natural forces involving only unthinking dete ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
