The English Patient in its sentential aspect
A tale of love, betrayal, and politics surrounding a pilot whose plane crashed and burnt in the Sahara Desert unfolds in a series of example sentences illustrating Burzio's generalization and the Unaccusative Hypothesis as he arrives, collapses, and ultimately dies.
The English noun phase in its sentential aspect is an influential linguistics dissertation, both with respect to the theory it proposed and with respect to the catchiness of its title for parody.
The patient is the role in a clause of the entity affected by the action, when that entity does not cause the action, the entity causing the action being assigned the role of agent regardless of other relationships to the action.
Burzio's Generalization states that, across languages, a clause whose verb lacks its normal subject cannot have a direct object (or certain types of indirect object).
There is a class of verb whose agents are optionally expressed, and it is uniformly true that if the agent is expressed, it is the subject and the patient is the direct object, while if the agent is not expressed, the patient is the subject. This class includes words such as "crash", "burn", and "unfold". There is a further class which never have agents, and these pattern in various ways with the agent-less uses of the verbs in the previous class. This class includes words such as "arrive", "collapse", and "die". This pattern of verbs is called unaccusative verbs.
The Unaccusative Hypothesis states that intransitive verbs are either unaccusative or unergative (having only an agent), and that the classification of an intransitive verb can be checked by various syntactic diagnostics.
In The English Patient, as in a clause with an unaccusative verb, the subject is, of course, the patient.
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