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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]

This article explores semantic and grammatical properties of Latvian agent nouns that are derived from verbs by the suffix -ēj- (for primary verbs) or -tāj- (for secondary verbs). These formations show several peculiarities that distinguish them from agent nouns in other European languages and from similar Latvian nouns formed by other means. They are specialized in meaning, highly regular and transparent. They show verbal features such as aspectuality and combinability with adverbs, and they may inherit verbal arguments. The productivity of the formation is almost unlimited, and many ad hoc formations are found in colloquial style, for example in social media. In discourse, agent nouns often have a referential function, either as the only function or in combination with a concept-building function. The focus of the article is on less institutionalized tokens which show the potential of this morphological process that challenges traditional views about the functions of derivation or its delimitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the accentuation of suffixless deverbal nouns in Slavic language. It notes the conflict between paroxytone abstract nouns and oxytone concrete and agent nouns in Indo-European language. It examines the masculine suffixless deverbal nouns with a prefix and explores types of accentuation. Meanwhile, it discusses a hypothesis on the disintegration of the Proto-Slavic prosodic system as a result of semantic difference issue.

Experiencer-object verbs are known to deviate from the prototype of transitive verbs. Previous studies have shown that a subset of these verbs is stative and non-agentive and argue that this semantic peculiarity accounts for particular non-canonical syntactic properties. This article shows that the stativity/non-agentivity of experiencer verbs is subject to typological variation. The empirical evidence comes from an experimental study on speaker's intuitions, which shows that some experiencer-object verbs in German and Modern Greek differ from canonical transitive verbs in agentivity and stativity, while experiencer-object verbs in Turkish, Yucatec Maya, and Chinese display the semanto-syntactic properties of canonical transitive verbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ewe verbs covering the cutting and breaking domain divide into four morpho-syntactic classes that can be ranked according to agentivity. We demonstrate that the highly non-agentive break verbs participate in the causative-inchoative alternation while the highly agentive cut verbs do not, as expected from Guerssel et al.'s (1985) hypothesis. However, four verbs tso cut with precision, cut, snap-off, and dze split, are used transitively when an instrument is required for the severance to be effected, and intransitively when not. We reject a lexicalist analysis that would postulate polysemy for these verbs and argue for a construction approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates L2 learners' use of French derivational processes and their strategies as they form agent nouns. It also attempts to find out which of the acquisitional principles (conventionality, semantic transparency, formal simplicity, and productivity) advanced by Clark (1993, 2003) for various L1s acquisition of word formation processes are in accounting for L2 French derivational processes. Twenty-five adult university English-speaking learners in their second semester of French participated in this study. The data was collected by mean of two production tasks: Production task I (based on existing agent nouns), and production task II (based on innovations). The findings reveal that not all the four acquisitional principles account equally well for these L2 learners' use of word formation processes. Only conventionality and productivity principles appear to have a bearing on these learners' use of French derivational processes. Learners tend to use and opt for the productive and conventional derivational process /-eur/ to coin the agent nouns. This study has shed further light on the nature of learners' L2 lexical knowledge and on the order of acquisition of French derivational processes. Possible applications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to examine the properties of the agents in Latin impersonal constructions. First of all, explicit agents do occur with impersonal passives. Furthermore, when agents are not explicitly expressed, they are predictable from the context in a number of cases. The occurrence of explicit agents as well as their predictability seems crucially dependent upon the degree of Transitivity of the clause. The verbs that occur in impersonal constructions can be graded according to a scalar notion of Transitivity along a continuum from low-intransitives to high-intransitives. My hypothesis is that the lower the degree of Transitivity of the verbs the lower the referential properties shown by the agent. Moreover, according to my analysis, the category of non-referential agents should be split into two: generic (or universal) agents should be distinguished from non-referential indefinite ones on the basis of the inclusion or non-inclusion of all the participants in the event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]