Most of the basic points concerned with roles and relations were made in the previous chapter. This chapter looks at them in more detail.

Agent and Patient

There are two issues concerning the roles Agent and Patient, first, the question whether they are universal, and, secondly, their relation to the meaning-based notional roles.

The universality of the distinction

It might seem to be obvious that all languages must make a grammatical distinction between different roles such as that of Agent and Patient, because, if there are two arguments with a predicator, it is essential to know which role is played by each of the two arguments. If, for instance, we are talking about someone hitting someone else, we need to know who does the hitting (the agent) and who was hit (the patient), and it is precisely that distinction that is communicated by the formal markers of Agent and Patient (1.2.2). Without such identification, it might be thought, communication would be impossible. Are there, then, languages that do not make the distinction at all, i.e. that do not grammaticalize basic notional roles such as agent and patient?

It is unwise to maintain that there cannot possibly be such languages, for it is dangerous to speculate about what must be in language, and all too often what appears to be an ‘obvious’ fact about language turns out to be merely a feature of English and familiar (usually European) languages.