ABSTRACT
Journalists consider the headline, Dog Bites Man to be ordinary, while the headline Man Bites Dog is a scoop. What is the difference between them? Each sentence conveys an event with two participants, a man and a dog, and the same action, biting. But as Steven Pinker explains in his book The Language Instinct1, the sentences are distinguished by “who did what to whom”. The sentences of a language convey not only events and participants, but also the particular role that each participant takes in the event. In the first sentence, it’s the dog that performs the action on the man, while in the second, the roles are reversed, creating the newspaper sensation.
