44 Participant Roles and Middle Voice
For an example of participants, take the English sentence ‘The man caught the bear.’ Here there are two participants: ‘the man’ and ‘the bear.’ Now compare that sentence with this one ‘The bear caught the man.’ In this second sentence there are two participants: ‘the man’ and ‘the bear.’ The participants are the same in the two sentences, but their roles are very different.
In ‘The man caught the bear,’ the participant doing the action is ‘the man,’ while the participant undergoing the action is ‘the bear.’ These roles are reversed in ‘The bear caught the man.’
The standard name for the role of the participant doing the action is agent. The standard name for the role of the participant undergoing the action is patient:
The man caught the bear. The bear caught the man.
AGENT PATIENT AGENT PATIENT
In English, we know who is doing what to whom by the order of the words in the sentence: the agent in basic sentences like these is the subject and comes before the verb, while the patient is the direct object and comes after the verb.
In some English sentences the patient can be the subject of the sentence and come before the verb. Take a minute now and try to think of a sentence like this.
If you can’t think of one, go back and review §31 and try to think of one again.
If you thought of a passive sentence, you are right! ‘The man caught the bear’ is said to be in the active voice. Here is the passive voice version of that sentence:
The bear was caught by the man.
PATIENT AGENT
In this sentence ‘the bear’ is the subject and the patient. The agent in this sentence is the object of the preposition ‘by.’
The passive voice is a way to focus attention on the participant undergoing the action. It does this by making the patient the subject.
As it happens, there is a wide variety of ways that languages around the world indicate participants and who is doing what to whom. You have already seen in §31 how the passive works in Klallam. You should definitely review that section now.
In this section you will learn more about how participants are indicated in Klallam. In particular you will learn that, in addition to an active voice and a passive voice, Klallam also has a middle voice.