On the responsibility concept and the agentive role of the instrument used for the action performance

Abstract

It is well established that the choice of subject depends on what the speaker estimates as most responsible for the successful occurrence of the action he is speaking of. The author enlightens the principles according to which in Serbian such a subject promotion may concern objects conceived as instruments indispensable for the performance of the transitive activity denoted by the sentence predicate verb. Pointing, however, to some Dutch language facts which make it quite evident that those principles are by no means universally valid, she claims that still more information about the whole problem are needed. She is, namely, convinced that such line of inquiry would not only enrich our present knowledge of micro parametric variations within the linguistic world, but could also be of relevant help to those researchers who expect, through observation of the facts of language, to get better insights into the ways the human brain works.