agentpatient

Agentpatient is a term sometimes used in linguistics and cognitive science to describe the relationship between two core semantic roles in actions: the agent and the patient. The agent is the entity that initiates or controls an action, while the patient is the entity that undergoes change or is affected by the action. The phrase is not a universally standardized label, but serves as a convenient shorthand for discussions that emphasize how these roles are encoded and interact across different languages and theories.

In syntax, agent-patient relations are central to voice and diathesis phenomena. Active voice typically foregrounds the agent, while passive constructions foreground the patient. Some languages or constructions allow rearrangements or marking that highlight different participants, and theoretical frameworks often explore overlap or mapping between agent and patient within events. Constructions such as antipassives, applicatives, or middle voices illustrate how languages manipulate the encoding of agent and patient.

In cognitive science and artificial intelligence, agent-patient modeling helps represent how an actor operates on a target. This framing supports tasks in event extraction, natural language understanding, planning, and robotics, where identifying who acts and who is acted upon is essential for interpretation and action.

Example: The farmer (agent) waters the field (patient). In the passive: The field (patient) is watered by the farmer (agent). The term thus aids description of how participants are labeled, processed, and manipulated in linguistic analysis and computational representations of events.