Remarks on involuntary agent constructions

Abstract

The present paper discusses formal and semantic features of so-called "Involuntary Agent Constructions" (lAC for short) from a crosslinguistic perspective. The label refers to constructions that express the meaning 'do sth. accidentally/involuntarily'. This means that in contrast to a canonical agent the feature of volitionality is lacking. The paper shows that volitionality (and thus agency) is an important part of linguistic transitivity, since in many languages lAC's are formally less transitive constructions than canonical transitive clauses. On the basis of their formal features, lAC's will be divided into four types. In addition to the formal typology of lAC's, the paper also discusses semantic features that condition the use of lAC's in languages. These include the semantics of events and the nature of the agent. On the basis of these features it is shown that lAC's are constructions that express the unexpected low degree of agency associated with an event. For example, forces like 'wind' do not readily appear in lAC's due to their inherently low degree of agency. Also the additional functions that lAC's can express are discussed.

Differential Agent Marking and animacy

“…One of the features that could be interesting for further research is intentionality, which was briefly touched upon in section 3.1. Both unintentional human Agents and inanimate Agents are low in volitionality, but, as shown by Kittilä (2005), this does not entail that intentionality and animacy have the same effect on DAM. While there is some published work on intentionality and DAM/DSM (see e.g.…”

Untitled

“…Важным результатом исследования является создание комплексного подхода к маркированности, который может быть применен и для объяснения дифференци-рованного маркирования субъекта (ср. также работы [Kittilä 2005;Fauconnier 2011], посвященные особенностям падежного оформ-ления субъектов).…”

“…7 Более скептическую позицию относительно факторов, влияю-щих на согласование, занимает А. Седиги, по данным которой, носители склонны разрешать оба варианта согласования при предъявлении мини-мальных пар с различием по степени индивидуализации субъектов и их определенности (или «специфичности»), т. е. варьирование в согласова-нии с точки зрения данных параметров скорее можно охарактеризовать как свободное [Sedighi 2003;2005].…”

“…One such construction is the so-called Oblique Causer Construction, which is exemplified below by sentences from German (1) and Icelandic (2) [Wood 2013] This construction has been widely discussed in recent literature. Thus, Kittilä [2005] provides a typological overview of this construction, which he calls Involuntary Agent Construction, discuss this construction in Agul, a Dagestanian language closely related to Lezgian. Schäfer [2008] provides a survey of several languages which possess this construction and identifies several properties which characterize the Oblique Causer Construction (OblCC) in these languages.…”

On dative causers in Hungarian

“…The previous literature has mostly focused on reading (i), but Ganenkov et al (2008) point out in reference to Kittilä (2005) that besides many East Caucasian languages, the same ambiguity is found in Bagwalal, Finnish and Thomson River Salish in oblique causer constructions. Schäfer (2008, 107-108) shows that the German, Italian and Greek oblique causer constructions allow for exactly the same three readings.…”