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The first objective of this paper is to provide justification for the claim that variation between the prepositions por 'by' and de 'of' introducing the subject argument in Spanish nominalisations should not be explained as primarily paralleling sentence-level voice or aspectual distinctions. The strongest arguments against assuming a direct analogy between the clausal and the phrasal levels with respect to these functional categories are, on the one hand, that the use of agentive por-phrases is far from limited to nominals which can reasonably be claimed to bear a resemblance to a passive structure and on the other, that de-marking of the Agent is fully compatible with an activity reading of the nominal, as opposed to a result reading. Secondly, as an alternative, it is proposed that the use of por vs. de relates to the perceived degree of agentivity of the subject referent, correlated with the degree of affectedness experienced by the object referent and that por functions as a semantic marker overtly signalling agentivity rather than a syntactic marker of subjective Case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The origin of the Germanic suffixes forming occupational titles and agent nouns -- masculine *-ārijaz (the ancestor of Modern English -er) and its feminine counterpart reflected in Old English as -estre and in Modern as -ster -- is an old problem in Germanic historical morphology. The masculine "agentive" suffix, which occurs in all the subgroups of Germanic, is generally presumed to be of Latin origin, though it occurs mostly with native derivational bases even in the earliest attested Germanic languages; the latter is believed to be native, but has no accepted etymology, and its limited range of occurrence in Germanic remains unexplained. It will be argued that the two suffixes are etymologically connected in a hitherto unsuspected way, that the traditional opinion about the origin of *-ārijaz should be revised, and that both suffixes have interesting Indo- European cognates outside Germanic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the classification and analysis of different types of German synthetic compounds headed by deverbal agent nouns in -er, such as Romanleser 'novel-reader' or Gedankenleser 'mind-reader', where the non-head is seen to saturate an argument of the head lexeme while adhering to the semantic interpretation found in corresponding VPs (e.g. the distinct senses of read in the previous examples). In contrast to several previous approaches, which attempt to explain the relationship between VPs and compounds using a unified mechanism of incorporation or derivation, we argue that different compounding patterns require different analyses and that the respective constructions are to some extent independent of each other. While some compounds are modelled after frequent, familiar VPs and take account of the usage profile of syntactic phrases, other productive sets of compounds extend independently lexicalized schemas with fixed compound heads. To support our analysis we undertake the largest empirical survey of these formations to date, using a broad coverage Web corpus. We suggest several categories of verb-object lexeme pairs to account for our data and formulate an analysis of the facts within the framework of Construction Morphology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]