Zooming in on agentivity: Experimental studies of DO-clefts in German

Abstract

Despite the importance of the agent role for language grammar and processing, its definition and features are still controversially discussed in the literature on semantic roles. Moreover, diagnostic tests to dissociate agentive from non-agentive roles are typically applied with qualitative introspection data. We investigated whether quantitative acceptability ratings obtained with a well-established agentivity test, the DO-cleft, provide evidence for the feature-based prototype account of (Dowty, David R. 1991. Thematic proto-roles and argument selction. Language 67(3). 547–619) postulating that agentivity increases with the number of agentive features that a role subsumes. We used four different intransitive verb classes in German and collected acceptability judgements from non-expert native speakers of German. Our results show that sentence acceptability increases linearly with the number of agentive features and, hence, agentivity. Moreover, our findings confirm that sentience belongs to the group of proto-agent features. In summary, this suggests that a multidimensional account including a specific mechanism for role prototypicality (feature accumulation) successfully captures gradient acceptability clines. Quantitative acceptability estimates are a meaningful addition to linguistic theorizing.

Semantic-role prominence is contingent on referent prominence in discourse: Experimental evidence from impersonals and passives in Polish

“…This in turn directly touches on the ongoing debate about the adequate definition of the agent and other semantic roles (see Levin & Rappaport-Hovav 2005). There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that a feature-based definition of the agent and other roles can capture a number of empirical findings more accurately than, for instance, atomic or monolithic role definitions (Rissman & Majid 2019;Kretzschmar et al 2019;Kretzschmar & Brilmayer 2020). Intriguingly, the evidence in favour of feature-based role definitions has accrued for Dowty's (1991) prototype model, which, while being largely consistent with other feature-based models (e.g.…”

“…In sum, there is converging evidence for the empirical adequacy of Dowty's (1991) role features (Rissman & Majid 2019) and the existence of subtypes of the agent role, signalling varying degrees of agentivity (Kretzschmar & Brilmayer 2020). However, feature accumulation as a mechanism for feature interaction has only rarely been studied directly (Kretzschmar et al 2019;Kretzschmar & Brilmayer 2020).…”

“…In sum, there is converging evidence for the empirical adequacy of Dowty's (1991) role features (Rissman & Majid 2019) and the existence of subtypes of the agent role, signalling varying degrees of agentivity (Kretzschmar & Brilmayer 2020). However, feature accumulation as a mechanism for feature interaction has only rarely been studied directly (Kretzschmar et al 2019;Kretzschmar & Brilmayer 2020). This is an important research gap -which the current study aims to address -as there is evidence that an alternative mechanism, feature weighting, may also yield agentivity effects in sentence interpretation.…”