35 Participant Roles and Middle Voice
For an example of participants, compare these two English sentences:
The man caught the bear.
The bear caught the man.
In both sentences, 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 active transitive 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. The most common type of sentence like this is the passive (§33).
‘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. How the passive works in SENĆOŦEN is covered in §33 It would be good to review that section before beginning this section.
This section describes more about how participants are indicated in SENĆOŦEN. In particular, this section explains that in addition to an active voice and a passive voice, SENĆOŦEN also has a middle voice.