In linguistics, a grammatical agent is an entity that carries out an action. For example, in the sentence "Jack kicked the ball", Jack is the agent. In certain languages, the agent is declined or otherwise marked to indicate its grammatical role. In Japanese, for instance, the agent is typically affixed with the hiragana が (pronounced "ga"). Although Modern English does not mark grammatical role, agency is informally represented using certain conventions; for instance, with the morphemes "-ing", "-er", or "-or", as in "eating", "user", or "prosecutor". Broadly conceived, linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. ... A noun, or noun substantive, is a word or phrase that refers to a person, place, thing, event, substance or quality. ... A verb is a part of speech that usually denotes action (bring, read), occurrence (to decompose (itself), to glitter), or a state of being (exist, live, soak, stand). Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its tense, aspect, mood and voice. ... In linguistics, declension is a feature of inflected languages: generally, the alteration of a noun to indicate its grammatical role. ... Japanese writing Kanji 漢字 Kana 仮名 Hiragana 平仮名 Katakana 片仮名 Uses Furigana 振り仮名 Okurigana 送り仮名 Romaji ローマ字 Hiragana (平仮名, literally smooth kana) are a Japanese syllabary, one of four Japanese writing systems (the others are katakana, kanji and rōmaji). ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest language unit that carries a semantic interpretation. ...

The grammatical agent is often confused with the subject, but there is a slight difference: the former is based explicitly on its relationship to the verb, whereas the latter is based on its prominence in the sentence. To illustrate: in the passive sentence "The cake is eaten by Maria", the cake is the subject, and Maria is the agent. However, in most sentences, the agent and the subject tend to match. The subject of a verb is the argument which generally refers to the origin of the action or the undergoer of the state shown by the verb. ... A verb is a part of speech that usually denotes action (bring, read), occurrence (to decompose (itself), to glitter), or a state of being (exist, live, soak, stand). Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its tense, aspect, mood and voice. ... In grammar, voice is the relationship between the action or state expressed by a verb, and its arguments (subject, object, etc. ...