Agent Nouns Research Articles

Agent in Kurdish language (Bahdini subdialect)

The agent in the Kurdish language, especially in modern grammar, is known as a semantic role, limiting its function to the sentence level. To contradict this view, an attempt has been made in this study to explain the agent at both morphological and syntactic levels. At the morphological level, some derivational bound morphemes play a major role in forming some nouns that carry within themselves the concept of the agent known as agent nouns. Also at the sentence level, in addition to the semantic features of the noun phrase that identify and distinguish the agent role from other roles, it is expected that the verb phrase can contribute greatly in the identification and recognition of the agent. For this purpose, Larson's theory (1988) has been employed to deconstruct the VP-shell into the main verb phrase VP and the light verb phrase (carrier of the concept of agent in the VP). The sentences are analyzed according to Chomsky's minimalist program principles. Research data is collected from the everyday speech of Bahdini dialect speakers. Results show that Larson's theory of deconstructing the VP could be considered the best and only way to analyze the agent in the Bahdini sentence; and the morpheme (ان), in addition to its agentive and causative functions, can also function as a light verb.

Agensbildungen im Altfriesischen

Abstract In Germanic, the presence of various devices to express ‘agent’ implies that this was a fundamentally important cognitive category. These devices are mainly morphological, and we find various competing agentive word formation patterns. This article provides a corpus-based analysis of the morphological agentive word formation patterns in Old Frisian. These range from suffixal derivation with different suffixes such as Gmc *-(j)an- and the loan suffix Gmc *-ā̆rja-, to compounds with suffixoids such as -mon or -māster. The corpus for the analysis is gathered from the Altfriesische Handwörterbuch by Hofmann and Popkema (2008) and, as such, it offers an insight into the whole corpus of Old Frisian agent nouns.

Англоязычный лингвокультурный сценарий “Marketing”: структурно-семантические особенности языковых единиц

The aim of the study is to identify the structural and semantic features of the linguistic units that are the means of linguistic representation of the English-language linguocultural scenario “Marketing”. The paper sheds light on the notion of a “linguocultural scenario”, describes the frame structure of the scenario by highlighting the supporting concepts and sub-concepts. The scientific novelty of the study consists in considering the English-language linguocultural scenario “Marketing”, which has not previously become the object of research, as a cognitive scheme of a speech situation using an integrated cognitive and cultural approach to linguistic material. As a result of the study, the predominance of structurally separable nominal linguistic units was determined, they are represented by non-prepositional constructions, two-component phrases with a deverbal substantive as a core element, means of compressive word formation and two-word verb phrases. Affixal agentive nouns, compound nouns denoting types of goods and basic terms of the marketing sphere, emotionally charged adjectives used in describing the qualities of goods and services, verbs of the business sphere and “highly specialized verbs” of the marketing domain predominate among structurally inseparable linguistic units.

Nomination in the feminine aspect: Traditions and innovations in the Russian, Tatar and English languages

This article discusses the features characterizing the nominations of women that have developed in the linguistic system of the Russian, English and Tatar languages and determines the trends of modern word formation in relation to the name of the woman. These nominations are based on the agentive nouns of the Russian, English and Tatar languages with the meaning of femininity. The difficulty of studying this issue lies in the fact that nouns, denoting the female gender, are not always recorded in normative and special dictionaries, which reduces the possibility of assessing the usual or occasional nature of a particular lexical unit. Proceeding from this provision, we did not carry out the analysis of the fixed units with respect to this feature; however, the study uses the data on the frequency of the phenomenon presented in the corpus of the corresponding language. The article discusses the issues of word-formation that characterize this group of nouns and draws conclusions about the development trends in this area of nominations. The study is based on lexical units denoting the nominations of the woman and fixed by the corpora of the corresponding language in the period from 2000 to 2021. These units were selected by automated sampling and manually cross-checked. At the same time, we conducted a comparative analysis of this phenomenon in the Russian, English and Tatar languages to identify development trends. The study found that both traditional suffixes and new elements are used as word-building formants, which modify and supplement the meaning of the name based on their own semantics. The trend towards the absence of gender differentiation in a person’s professional nominations is more characteristic of the English language.

From noun to future tense

Abstract This article explores a typologically unusual but recurrent evolutionary path of innovated future formations neglected by typological research: the change of predicative deverbal nouns (understood here in the broad sense of any deverbal nominal expression/formation) – namely agent nouns and participles – denoting actions typical of referents to future verb-forms via hypoanalysis. Starting with an overview of typologically recurrent ways of creating new future formations, the article seeks to demonstrate that the l-future found in the three Nuristani languages Nuristani Kalasha, Ashkun and Katë developed from active participles designating actions typical of their referents. As a typological parallel of this development the Vedic Sanskrit tā́-future is established, and it is shown by the example of the English will + infinitive future and the futurate use of Russian perfective non-past verb-forms how the change of predicative deverbal nouns denoting actions typical of referents to future verb-forms is brought about by means of hypoanalysis.

Language change and the actuation problem: grammaticalization in Vedic Sanskrit

Abstract One of the structures denoting the future in Sanskrit is the so-called -tā́-future, based on an agent noun and a present tense copula. Typologically, this grammaticalization path is unique. In this paper, this astonishing fact is tied to another unique feature of hysterotone -tŕ̥-nouns, their situative semantics, which forces a presupposition relating the event depicted by the noun to another event taken from the context. In ambiguous contexts, this relation could be (re-)interpreted by hearers as one between the event and the speech act itself. The grammaticalization, then, is hearer-based and triggered by semantic reanalysis. The process is essentially identical to phonemicization. The scenario developed in this paper thus further strengthens the position that grammaticalization is ontologically not distinct from other types of language change based on speaker–hearer interaction.

An account of agentive suffixes in Luganda

This article is situated within the theoretical context of Word-Formation and the Weak Lexicalism framework. It examines agent noun formation in Luganda, an East African Bantu language. Using an electronic journalistic corpus from a Luganda daily, this study specifically analyses the formation of de-verbal agent nouns and the corresponding morphological paradigms of suffixation. The results demonstrate in contrast with findings made by Ferrari-Bridgers (2009), thatmagentive suffixes exist in Luganda, dominated by the suffix -i.

The head constituent plays a key role in the lexical boost in syntactic priming

Accounts of language production make different predictions about the conditions under which structural priming should be enhanced by lexical repetition (the lexical boost). Repetition of the head verb strongly enhances structural priming of a sentence, but studies of English have found contradictory results regarding the effects of noun repetition. In two experiments, Mandarin participants read a prime sentence aloud and then produced a target picture description of a dative event. In Experiment 1, the verb was printed on the target picture, and we found that repetition of the verb enhanced priming (vs. no repetition) but repetition of the agent, theme, or recipient argument did not. In Experiment 2, both the agent noun and the verb were printed on the picture, and we found that verb repetition enhanced priming but agent repetition did not. These results indicate that the lexical boost is restricted to the head verb in Mandarin and therefore support lemma-based residual activation accounts of language production in which activation of a head leads to activation of its associated grammatical construction.

Způsoby označování osob z hlediska ne/binarity genderu: kvantitativní sonda do titulních stran vybraných českých periodik

Criticising the use of the generic masculine, feminist and gender linguists have proposed different alternatives. In the Czech context, the following three types of alternatives can be distinguished: (1)Â feminisation, (2)Â neutralisation and paraphrases, and (3)Â making non-binary persons linguistically more visible. Empirical studies on the usage frequency of these alternatives, however, are lacking. This paper addresses this issue by analysing agentive nouns and the feminisation of surnames in selected Czech newspapers. The results show that in references to individual women almost exclusive use is made of feminine expressions. Mixed-gender groups are still largely referred to using the generic masculine. In only a minority of occurrences are neutralising strategies used to refer to persons. What is more common, however, is to find neutralising strategies being used where the intention of expressing gender fairness was probably not the reason for their use, as referring to persons is not their primary function. Neither pair forms nor graphic symbols for non-binary reference are used. The surnames of female foreign nationals are almost always feminised, even though this is not necessary and the texts provide other linguistic means of identifying the persons as women. Based on an analysis of the distribution of generically-intended masculine expressions in the analysed texts, I propose dividing them into two types according to whether or not there is an obvious inclusion of females and non-binary persons.

Hdt. 4.79 διεπρήστευσε

This paper examines the form διεπρήστευσε, obelized in the editions of Herodotus. There have been two ways of interpreting the form: some scholars have taken it to refer to an act of speech, while others have sought here a verb of motion. Both groups of scholars proposed a variety of conjectures, some of them addenda lexicis and none of them commanding immediate acceptance. After a review of various solutions that have been proposed to-date, this paper argues in favor of retaining the reading of the paradosis and analyzing (-)πρηστεύω as a verb of quick motion. The verb is argued to be an Ionic colloquialism (or even Herodotus’ own Augenblicksbildung), derived from the root of πίμπρημι in its original meaning ‘to blow’ (of which ‘to burn’ is a secondary development) via an agent noun πρηστήρ / *πρήστης, cf. μνηστεύω ‘woo’ : μνηστήρ ‘suitor’ or δυναστεύω ‘hold power’ : δυνάστης ‘person with power’. The proposed translation ‘blasted, dashed’ is supported by typological parallels for the semantic development ‘to blow’ → ‘to move (impetuously)’, such as Old English bl.́stan ‘to blow; to move impetuously’ or Russian dut’ ‘to blow; to dash, to rush’. Interestingly, Hittite (parip) parāi-, the cognate of Gk. πίμπρημι, may show the same semantic

Characteristics of exocentric nominal compounds in Berom: A semantic view of the noun-verb agentive mwat tabak and mwat ha

Nominal compounds, which are very productive in Berom, are formed by combining the noun and verb constituents. The NV compounds are interpreted as the agent, location, or instrument based on the meaning of the existing nominal constituent. This study analyses the semantics of two types of Berom agentive compounds: mwat tabak ‘preacher, [literally, person shoot]’ and mwat ha ‘speaker, [literally, person talk]’. First, both words are realized from the NV structure and the agentive meaning of the compounds is derived from the interpretation of an unspecified N [mwat] that performs the action which is apparently expressed by the V constituent in mwat ha and an action that is not expressed by the V constituent in mwat tabak. Secondly, the two compounds lack the deverbal suffix such as the English -er that is usually attached to agentive nouns and as such they are both treated as compounds with different semantic realizations. The analyses show that the two constructions vary significantly not only in terms of semantics, but also in their specific role and interpretation of the action expressed by the verbal constituent. We argued that the agent nouns in the compounds employ diverse prosodic features such as tone and pitch, in the activity that the compound revealed. Consequently, we conclude that the meaning of agentive compounds in Berom may not necessarily be determined by the structural and semantic property of the compound but by the interaction between the constituents and the relevant context of usage.

Modelling polysemy and categorial ambiguity in a constructional family

Abstract In this paper we analyse a family of compound constructions in Persian that show two interesting properties: (1) they split into two semantic patterns, human agent noun and instrument noun, and (2) they display categorial ambiguity between noun and adjective. The compounds in question, which are formed with the verbal stem -yāb ‘find’, are collected from diachronic and synchronic corpora and analysed in the framework of Construction Morphology (Booij 2010). We argue that the instrumental pattern is an innovation under the influence of loan-translated English instrument nouns. This pattern dovetailed with a much older morphological construction for human agent nouns. This raises questions about the relation between the two constructions in the contemporary speaker’s lexicon. For the dual functionality of the words as nouns and adjectives, we argue that it can be understood as a second order schema (Booij & Masini 2015) or sister construction (Jackendoff & Audring 2019, 2020), whereby no precedence is ascribed to either of the two patterns.

DERIVATIVES DENOTING PERSONS IN TURKISH MOTIVATED BY COMPOUND VERBS

With the development of the anthropocentric direction in modern linguistics, there is a tendency towards a complex study of man. One of the aspects of this approach is the study of the individual as a doer. Therefore, this article focusses on the linguistic patterns characterizing the doer of the action with regard to the character traits and actions performed by the doer. In the present study the object of research is the names of males excerpted from Turkish lexicographical sources formed according to derivational models and distributed in one of the word-formation types nomina agentis (agentive nouns). The aim is to perform semantic-structural modelling of the category of agentiveness in a synchronic way, considering also the diachronic one, insofar as the productivity of derivational models is related to the historical changes that have occurred.

Noun Morphology of Kafi Noono

This paper aims at describing noun morphology in Kafi Noonoo (the Kafa language). Kafi Noonoo is an Afroasiatic language belonging to the Omotic family. The language is now been reduced to writing and is serving as a medium of instruction, administrative, media, and judiciary tool in the Kafa zone since 2008. The study is made to look into the noun morphology of the language. To achieve this, primary data has been collected from Kafa Zone and analyzed categorically. Nouns in the language generally end in -o/oo in their lexical entry (i.e. in isolation). Few nouns end in - e(e), and few place names that end in -ɑ, and a few in -i. Most proper nouns end in -i. The vowels attached also indicate the gender (-o/ -oo (masculine), -e/ -ee (feminine)) and number (e.g. ɡédʤò ‘lake(s)) of the head noun. Proper names usually end in -i; and morphologically, the prototypical Kafi Noonoo noun inflects for gender, number, and case. Under the noun morphology of Kafi Noonoo, the discussion of proper names, common nouns, derived nouns (of different forms of verbal nouns, abstract nouns, agentive nouns, and result nouns), compounds (resulting in euphemism, verb-manner compounds, language names and compounds with Ɂìndèé ‘mother’ and dòónò ‘lord’) has been discussed. Noun inflection of Kafi Noonoo nouns is also discussed. Thus, it is attested that the language inflects gender (usually masculine and feminine), number (singular and plural; the latter is formed by suffixing -nàʔó), and case. Concerning case, Kafi Noonoo has distinct case marking morphemes which are identified and discussed as follows. Thus, the nominative (appears unmarked), accusative (marked either by the morpheme -n, or by lengthening the final vowel, or it can be found unmarked), vocative (morphologically unmarked), allative (suffixes -wàán ‘to(wards)’ or -máɡ), ablative (expressed by -wàánè or -máɡè ‘from’), dative, locative, genitive (all these three are marked by the suffix -ttʃ), instrumental (expressed by the morpheme -nà), comitative (expressed by -nnà), similative(marked by -òóm), and comparative (marked by -jèè to the compared subject) cases have been identified in Kafi Noonoo.

The root of all gluttony

Abstract The etymological analysis of Attic Greek τένθης ‘gourmand, glutton’ (Ar.+) has focused since Antiquity on comparison with the obscure Hesiodic hapax τένδει (Op. 524). Rejecting this unpromising solution, in this paper I go back to a forgotten proposal by Solmsen (1897), who compared τένθης with the PN Πενθεύς ~ Τενθεύς and Lat. condiō ‘to season (food)’, reconstructing a root *kʷendʰ-/*kʷondʰ-. While Solmsen did not pursue further analysis of this root, I propose that it arose - possibly already at the PIE stage - from *kʷem- ‘gulp, swallow’ with addition of the “detransitivizing” suffix *-dʰ-e/o-. The present stem *kʷem-dʰe/o- would have had the intransitive meaning ‘to swallow food’ with Indefinite Object Deletion, as is typologically common in “ingestive” verbs. In addition to the agent noun τένθης, I suggest that πάθνη ~ φάτνη ‘crib, manger’ was another nominal derivative of the ‘neo-root’ *kʷendʰ-/*kʷondʰ-/*kʷn̥dʰ-. I conclude by discussing other possible etymologies of Lat. condiō.

Tocharian B agent nouns in -ntsa and their origin

Abstract The agent noun suffix in -ntsa belongs to a complex of Tocharian B agent noun formations, similar in form, function, and inflection. Of these, two suffixes are widely believed to be related to -ntsa: the productive agent noun in -ñca and the lexicalised agent noun in -nta. The suffix -ntsa forms occupational titles to eleven verbs in Tocharian B and can be reconstructed for Proto-Tocharian through comparison with Tocharian A. In this paper, it is argued that the suffix originated in the feminine of the PIE active participle in *-nt. This is substantiated by the fact that several ntsa-nouns refer to primarily female professions, as well as the existence of the relic forms Bpreṃtsa ‘pregnant’ and Blāntsa ‘queen’. Furthermore, it is proposed that the masculine is reflected in the suffixes -ñca and -nta and that the disintegration of gendered inflection in the participle led to its development into several agent noun formations.

Distributional semantics insights on agentive suffix rivalry in French

The formation of French agent nouns (ANs) involves a large variety of morphological constructions, and particularly of suffixes. In this study, we focus on the semantic counterpart of agentive suffix diversity and investigate whether the morphological variety of ANs correlates with different agentive subtypes. We adopt a distributional semantics approach and combine manual, computational and statistical analyses applied to French ANs ending in -aire, -ant, -eur, -ien, -ier and -iste. Our methodology allows for a large-scale study of ANs and involves both top-down and bottom-up procedures. We first characterize agentive suffixes with respect to their morphosemantic and distributional properties, outlining their specificities and similarities. Then we automatically cluster ANs into distributionally relevant subsets and examine their properties. Based on quantitative analysis, our study provides a new perspective on agentive suffix rivalry in French that both confirms existing claims and sheds light on previously unseen phenomena.

Why and How Do New Tense Formations Arise? – On the Emergence of the Vedic So-Called Periphrastictā-Future

This article examines the emergence of the Vedic Sanskrit so-called periphrastic tā-future as it is encountered from Middle Vedic prose texts onwards. An initial synchronic account of the morphosyntactic and functional properties of the tā-future contrasting it with the comparable syá-future shows that the former is essentially finite in nature and not periphrastic, and that it instantiates future actuality denoting future actions taking place with certainty, while the latter instantiates future potentiality in denoting future actions intended or supposed to take place without certainty. The subsequent diachronic survey seeks to give a complete account of the emergence of the tā-future. It is demonstrated in detail that and how the tā-future originated in NOM.SG.M. oxytone agent nouns or sequences of such nouns and the copula in constructions denoting general truths and acquired its function as a modal replacement of the prospective subjunctive which was lost in Middle Vedic.

Bracketing paradoxes: A dependency grammar analysis in terms of morph catenae

Abstract This manuscript examines various types of bracketing paradoxes: classical “personal noun” constructions, parasynthetic compounds, agentive deverbal nouns, compound denominal adjectives, plural nouns with lexicalized modifiers, multiple auxiliary constructions, and German particle verb constructions. We argue that given a dependency-based view of both sentence and word structure, these bracketing puzzles become non-paradoxical. The morph catena is taken to be the fundamental unit of morphosyntax. A morph catena is A MORPH OR A COMBINATION OF MORPHS THAT ARE CONTINUOUS WITH RESPECT TO DOMINANCE. This notion is derived from its syntactic equivalent, the catena, which is defined as a word or a combination of words that are continuous with respect to dominance. Given an understanding of morphosyntax that acknowledges morph catenae, bracketing paradoxes are resolved by the ability of morph catenae to reach across words to include parts of words.

Affixation as a derivational process in Tiv

The study of morphology is of the essence in every language in order to understand the processes involved in word creation and inflection. Affixation in Tiv has been studied by many researchers, however, more attention is given to the inflectional aspect of Affixation in the language. Although, a well-cited book in Tiv treats both inflectional and derivational morphology in the language, this book does not study Affixation with a theoretical back up. In addition to that, the book features a misrepresentation about the derivational processes in Tiv, hence, the paper set to examine Affixation as a word-derivation process in Tiv using Hockett’s theory of Item-and–Arrangement and Item-and-Process. The researchers collected data for the study through primary and secondary sources. The study presents the following findings: nouns are derived from verbs by attaching the prefix {m-} to roots, formation of diminutive nouns is by adding the prefix {an-} to roots, and the derivation of nouns from adjectives is done through prefixation and suffixation of roots with {m-} and {-n} respectively. The study contributes to the existing literature on Tiv morphology by discovering the derivational processes in Tiv and removing the formation of agentive nouns from the derivational processes in the language in order to correct the misrepresentation of the agentive formation process as part of derivational Affixation.