Chapter Two
42
(19) Your doctor will normally advise you to stop taking Telmisartan Teva
Pharma before you become pregnant or as soon as you know you are
pregnant and will advise you to take another medicine instead of
Telmisartan Teva Pharma.In this version also two Figures can be distinguished that are, however,
completely different from the Figures in example (18): the medical doctor
is profiled as Figure against respectively the action (advise to stop taking)
and the undergoer/receiver of the advice (the (female) medical patient,
you) and the actions (becoming pregnant, knowing of being pregnant, and
taking another medicine), which represent together the Ground; (2) the
(female) medical patient is profiled as Figure (you) against her actions
becoming pregnant and knowing of being pregnant. In the last sequence of
the clause [Your doctor] will advise you to take another medicine instead
of Telmisartan Teva Pharma the patient participates indirectly in the event
being an element of the Ground.
Action chains
According to Langacker (2007: 421ff.), the well-known cognitive
archetypes (i.e. semantic roles such as ‘Agent’, ‘Patient’, ‘Instrument’ etc.)
are part of the cognitive instruments used for linguistic and non-linguistic
mental processing. In principles all roles can occur in subject position, but
in most cases the agent is the syntactic subject of a clause. Langacker
explains this phenomenon by the energy flow conception. Hereby, the
interaction between two entities is seen as respectively transfer and
absorption of energy by interacting objects or organisms. As longer
interactions imply a series of physical contact, Langacker introduced the
notion of ‘action chain’ that consists of a ‘head’ being both source and
transmitter of energy to a second, third etc. entity. The last entity (the so-
called ‘tail’ of the action chain) then only consumes the remaining energy.
This metaphorical explanation of syntactic patterns allows for a better
understanding of the syntactic structures of PILs and SmPCs, which differ
with respect to the allocation of role archetypes to the different slots in the
clauses. As the analysis of the corpus shows, in PILs an active style is
used which follows a recurrent pattern: The prominent element is the
syntactic subject or figure, which corresponds to the energetic head of the
action chain. Noticeably, the agent position is taken by both animate
(examples 20-22) and inanimate entities such as drugs (example 23) and
pathologies (example 24):
(20) Your doctor [Agent+] may check your kidney function [Patient-]