Patient (grammar)

In linguistics, a grammatical patient, also called the target or undergoer, is the participant of a situation upon whom an action is carried out. or the thematic relation such a participant has with an action. Sometimes "theme" and "patient" are used to mean the same thing.

When used to mean different things, "patient" describes a receiver that changes state ("I crushed the car") and "theme" describes something that does not change state ("I have the car"). By this definition, stative verbs act on themes and dynamic verbs act on patients.

Theory

Typically, the situation is denoted by a sentence, the action by a verb in the sentence, and the patient by a noun phrase.

For example, in the sentence "Jack ate the cheese", "the cheese" is the patient. In certain languages, the patient is declined for case or otherwise marked to indicate its grammatical role. In Japanese, for instance, the patient is typically affixed with the particle o (hiragana を) when used with active transitive verbs, and the particle ga (hiragana が) when used with inactive intransitive verbs or adjectives. Although Modern English does not mark grammatical role on the noun (but does through word order), patienthood is represented irregularly in other ways; for instance, with the morphemes "-en", "-ed", or "-ee", as in "eaten", "used", or "payee".

Grammar

In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules governing the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics.

Use of the term

The term grammar is often used by non-linguists with a very broad meaning. As Jeremy Butterfield puts it, "Grammar is often a generic way of referring to any aspect of English that people object to." However, linguists use it in a much more specific sense. Speakers of a language have a set of internalised rules for using that language. This is grammar, and the vast majority of the information in it is acquired—at least in the case of one's native language—not by conscious study or instruction, but by observing other speakers; much of this work is done during early childhood. Learning a language later in life usually involves a greater degree of explicit instruction.

Grammar (disambiguation)

Grammar

See also

Formal grammar

In formal language theory, a grammar (when the context is not given, often called a formal grammar for clarity) is a set of production rules for strings in a formal language. The rules describe how to form strings from the language's alphabet that are valid according to the language's syntax. A grammar does not describe the meaning of the strings or what can be done with them in whatever context—only their form.

Formal language theory, the discipline which studies formal grammars and languages, is a branch of applied mathematics. Its applications are found in theoretical computer science, theoretical linguistics, formal semantics, mathematical logic, and other areas.

A formal grammar is a set of rules for rewriting strings, along with a "start symbol" from which rewriting starts. Therefore, a grammar is usually thought of as a language generator. However, it can also sometimes be used as the basis for a "recognizer"—a function in computing that determines whether a given string belongs to the language or is grammatically incorrect. To describe such recognizers, formal language theory uses separate formalisms, known as automata theory. One of the interesting results of automata theory is that it is not possible to design a recognizer for certain formal languages.Parsing is the process of recognizing an utterance (a string in natural languages) by breaking it down to a set of symbols and analyzing each one against the grammar of the language. Most languages have the meanings of their utterances structured according to their syntax—a practice known as compositional semantics. As a result, the first step to describing the meaning of an utterance in language is to break it down part by part and look at its analyzed form (known as its parse tree in computer science, and as its deep structure in generative grammar).

Patient

A patient is any recipient of health care services. The patient is most often ill or injured and in need of treatment by a physiotherapist, physician, physician assistant, advanced practice registered nurse, psychologist, podiatrist, veterinarian, or other health care provider.

Etymology

The word patient originally meant 'one who suffers'. This English noun comes from the Latin word patiens, the present participle of the deponent verb, patior, meaning 'I am suffering,' and akin to the Greek verb πάσχειν (= paskhein, to suffer) and its cognate noun πάθος (= pathos).

Outpatients and inpatients

An outpatient (or out-patient) is a patient who is hospitalized for less than 24 hours. Treatment provided in this fashion is called ambulatory care. Sometimes surgery is performed without the need for a formal hospital admission or an overnight stay. This is called outpatient surgery. Outpatient surgery has many benefits, including reducing the amount of medication prescribed and using the physician's or surgeon's time more efficiently. More procedures are now being performed in a surgeon's office, termed office-based surgery, rather than in a hospital-based operating room. Outpatient surgery is suited best for healthy patients undergoing minor or intermediate procedures (limited urologic, ophthalmologic, or ear, nose, and throat procedures and procedures involving the extremities).

Patient (memoir)

Patient is the name of a 192-page memoir by musician Ben Watt. It was published May 1, 1997 by Penguin Books (ISBN 0-8021-3583-8). The book dealt largely with Watt's experience with a rare disease, Churg-Strauss syndrome, and his recovery.

The book was listed as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Sunday Times Book Of The Year chosen by William Boyd and Village Voice Literary Supplement Favorite Book of the Year, and was also a finalist for the Esquire-Waterstones Best Non-Fiction Award in the UK.

References

External links

Bluebottle Kiss

Bluebottle Kiss is a guitar-based, indie rock band from Sydney, Australia.

History

Formed in the mid 1990s, Bluebottle Kiss took its influences from the late 1980s American indie scene, which included artists such as Sonic Youth and the Afghan Whigs, singer-songwriters of the 1970s, such as Neil Young and Van Morrison, as well as the very creative Australian independent scene of the same period with artists such as The Church and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. The band signed to Murmur, an imprint of Sony Records. Initially, Bluebottle Kiss found only limited commercial success due to a challenging sound that ranged dissonant and rustic sounds to folk tinged, melancholy pop.

Although dropped from Murmur after the release of Somnambulist Homesick Blues in 1997, Bluebottle Kiss continued to make records on their own with various indie imprints. In 1998, Tap Dancing on the Titanic was issued on the now-dormant Troy Horse label. In 1999, Patient was released on Citadel Records, whose catalogue includes New Christs, Died Pretty, The Stems and more recently Knievel.