Abstract
This article investigates the morphological diversity of agent nouns (ANs) in French. It addresses the questions of which nouns form a semantically coherent class of ANs, what their morphological properties are, and whether these properties correlate with agentive subtypes. To deal with these issues, a distributional semantics approach is adopted. The investigation is based on the distributional study of monosemous deverbal ANs ending in -eur, and on the examination of word similarities in the French Wikipedia corpus. It is shown that French ANs as a homogeneous distributional class display a large variety of morphological profiles. ANs can be affixed, converted, compound nouns, as well as opaque and morphologically simple nouns. Agentive affixes are diverse and correlated to the selection of bases from different lexical categories and semantic types. It appears that agent meaning in the nominal domain is not necessarily imported from the verbal domain, but can develop directly in the semantic structure of nouns. In addition, a distinction between functional, occasional and behavioral ANs, depending on whether they denote agents with an occupational status, agents in a particular event, or agents with a tendency to act in a certain way, is proven to be distributionally relevant. This distinction applies to all ANs, possibly in correlation with specificities as regards morphological type, base and affix selection. The study illustrates that with a careful processing of linguistic data, distributional semantics can help answering basic research questions and support fine-grained theoretical distinctions.
Highlights
The class of agent nouns, i.e. nouns that describe performers of actions, is not clearly delimited in the existing literature
Lists of agentive suffixes are sometimes given for one language or another, but they differ according to the authors, and the criteria for identifying agent nouns (ANs) are rarely made explicit—one may question, for instance, the lexical category of the base, since the suffixes presented as agentive (e.g. -er, -ist, -an, -eer in English) are often not strictly deverbal devices
We investigate the morphological diversity of French ANs and the relation between form and meaning as concerns agent denotation
Summary
The class of agent nouns, i.e. nouns that describe performers of actions, is not clearly delimited in the existing literature. The category of agent noun ( AN) has been used mostly to characterize the lexical output of some derivational processes. Some representative instances of ANs are identified, that are usually deverbal nouns ending with a given suffix. The existence of a prototypical agentive suffix is generally admitted for languages such as Latin (-tor), English (-er), Spanish (-dor), Dutch (-er), German (-er), etc. Lists of agentive suffixes are sometimes given for one language or another, but they differ according to the authors, and the criteria for identifying ANs are rarely made explicit—one may question, for instance, the lexical category of the base, since the suffixes presented as agentive Lists of agentive suffixes are sometimes given for one language or another, but they differ according to the authors, and the criteria for identifying ANs are rarely made explicit—one may question, for instance, the lexical category of the base, since the suffixes presented as agentive (e.g. -er, -ist, -an, -eer in English) are often not strictly deverbal devices
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