APA Dictionary of Psychology

in linguistics, an analysis of sentences that gives primacy to the semantic relations between words (e.g., whether they are the agent or the patient of the action described) rather than to their syntactic relations (e.g., whether they are the subject or the object of the sentence). In the two sentences The boy hit the ball and The ball was hit by the boy, a case-grammar analysis would focus on the fact that boy is the agent of the action in both sentences, rather than the fact that it is the subject of the first sentence and the object in the second. Psychologists have shown a strong interest in case grammar because of its affinity to psychological categories of meaning. See also experiencer; instrumental.