Patient (grammar) in the context of "Thematic relations"

A reciprocal construction (abbreviated RECP) is a grammatical pattern in which each of the participants occupies both the role of agent and patient with respect to the other. An example is the English sentence John and Mary criticized each other: John criticized Mary, and Mary criticized John. Reciprocal constructions can be said to express mutual relationships.

Many languages, such as Semitic languages, Altaic languages or Bantu languages, have special reciprocal affixes in verbs. For example, Turkish reciprocal constructions which might also have slightly different meanings than the verbs they originate from, have the suffix -iş (-ış, -uş or -üş depending on the vowel harmony):

A transitive verb is a verb that entails one or more transitive objects, for example, 'enjoys' in Amadeus enjoys music. This contrasts with intransitive verbs, which do not entail transitive objects, for example, 'arose' in Beatrice arose.

Transitivity is traditionally thought of as a global property of a clause, by which activity is transferred from an agent to a patient.

In linguistic typology, object–verb–subject (OVS) or object–verb–agent (OVA) is a rare permutation of word order. OVS denotes the sequence object–verb–subject in unmarked expressions: Apples ate Sam, Thorns have roses. The passive voice in English may appear to be in the OVS order, but that is not an accurate description. In an active voice sentence like Sam ate the apples, the grammatical subject, Sam, is the agent and is acting on the patient, the apples, which are the object of the verb, ate. In the passive voice, The apples were eaten by Sam, the order is reversed and so that patient is followed by the verb and then the agent. However, the apples become the subject of the verb, were eaten, which is modified by the prepositional phrase, by Sam, which expresses the agent, and so the usual subject–verb–(object) order is maintained.

OVS sentences in English may be parsed if relating an adjective to a noun ("cold is Alaska") although cold is a predicative adjective, not an object. Rare examples of valid if idiomatic English use of OVS typology are the poetic hyperbaton "Answer gave he none" and "What say you?" Those examples are, however, highly unusual and not typical of modern spoken English.

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 ("detransitivizing process"), because it syntactically turns a transitive sense into an intransitive sense. This is not always the case; for example in Japanese a passive-voice construction does not necessarily decrease valence.