Patient (grammar)

In linguistics, the grammatical patient, also called the target or undergoer, is a semantic role representing the participant of a situation upon whom an action is carried out, or the thematic relation such a participant has with an action.

Sometimes, theme and patient are used to mean the same thing. When used to mean different things, patient describes a receiver that changes state ("I crushed the car") and theme describes something that does not change state ("I have the car"). By that definition, stative verbs act on themes, and dynamic verbs act on patients.