Lesson 16: English

Terms

• Subject (always nominative) = the word with which the verb agrees (in person and number). In “He stands,” “stands” agrees with the subject (“he”) in person (3rd) and number (singular).
  
• (Direct) Object (always accusative) = the word directly governed by a transitive verb in the active voice. In “I hit him,” the 3rd person pronoun (“he”) takes its oblique form (“him”) because it’s governed by the transitive verb, “to hit.”
• A verb is used transitively if it acts directly on a thing—which will be the direct object (accusative) in the active voice. For example, “Man bites dog.” Here the verb, “to bite” is being used transitively, as it is acting on the dog without an intervening preposition.
• Whereas in the question, “Does your dog bite?” the verb is used intransitively, because it isn’t acting on anything. Of course, there are many verbs which can never act on anything directly—such as, ‘to be,’ ‘to sit,’ etc.—which are therefore intransitive by nature. For example, “to sit” requires a preposition with an indirect object (“He sits on a throne”), so it doesn’t act directly on anything. Similarly, in “Rāma is king,” “being” is not acting on anything (Rāma is not acting on a king) so the verb is intransitive and “king” is not a direct object.

The English Passive

Take the sentence, “The king is struck by the servant,” where our use of the past participle, ‘struck,’ signals that this is a passive construction. We could of course state the same action actively without changing the meaning: “The servant strikes the king.” In either case, both people are still involved in the same action in the same way: the servant is still the one doing the striking and the king is still the one being struck. Which is to say that their semantic roles remain the same in both constructions. In each case the servant remains the agent (कर्तृ, literally, the “doer”) of the action, and the king remains the one being acted upon, i.e., the patient (कर्मन्) of the action. What’s changed is thus just the grammatical form each takes in the two constructions. In the active, the grammar focuses attention on the agent of the activity by making it the subject; in the passive, our focus is on the patient of the activity because it is the subject. So we can summarize the grammatical transformation represented by this shift between voices as follows:

• In the active (“the servant strikes the king”), the agent (the servant) is the subject (nom.) and the patient (the king) is the object (acc.).
• In the passive (“the king is struck by the servant”), the patient (the king) is the subject (nom.) and the agent (the servant) is in the instrumental (i.e., is subordinated by the preposition, “by,” in English).

Voice	Subject	Verb	(Object)	(Instrumental)
Active	The servant	strikes	the king
	Agent	active	Patient
Passive	The king	is struck		by the servant
	Patient	passive		Agent

This is why we distinguish agent and patient from subject and object. It is only when we have four distinct terms such as these that we can talk about the active and passive without ambiguity. The meaning of the voices should now be clear: “active” means agent-agreeing and “passive” means patient-agreeing. To summarize:

• The patient is a direct object only in the active voice; in the passive, the patient is the subject.
• The subject is an agent only in the active voice; in the passive, the agent is in the instrumental.
• And a verb is active if it agrees with its agent (i.e., where its agent is the subject) and is passive if it agrees with its patient (i.e., where its patient is the subject).