CausativePatient

CausativePatient is a term used in linguistics and natural language processing to label a participant in a sentence who experiences a change of state as a result of a causative event. The concept arises in analyses of causative constructions, where one participant (the causer) brings about an effect on another participant (the patient).

In this usage, the CausativePatient is distinct from the causer (the agent who initiates the action) and from non-causative patients who experience a state change without an explicit external cause. The label helps clarify event structure by distinguishing the role of the affected participant within causative clauses from other participants such as agents or beneficiaries.

Examples help illustrate the idea. In the sentence “The chef heated the soup,” the soup undergoes a change of state (becoming hot) due to the chef’s action, and can be described as the CausativePatient. In “The storm damaged the roof,” the roof is similarly the causative patient, altered by the storm’s effect. The terminology is especially useful in cross-linguistic studies, where languages encode causation with varying morphology and word order.

In practice, CausativePatient appears in some annotation schemes for corpora and in theoretical discussions of valency, causativity, and semantic roles. Not all frameworks use this exact label; some prefer broader terms like patient, theme, or causee. Thus, CausativePatient is a descriptive tool rather than a universally standardized category, intended to aid precise analysis of causative event structures. See also: causative construction, patient, agent, causer, causee.