Variable agentivity: Polysemy or underspecification
Malka Hovav,
Beth Levin
Abstract:Many English verbs typically used agentively allow non-agentive uses. Some recent approaches assume such verbs are unspecified for agentivity, although in principle, polysemy is also an option. We demonstrate the complexity of variable agentivity through an in-depth examination of the English verb sweep, which shows variable agentivity due to both underspecification and motivated polysemy. Drawing on corpus data, we identify two senses for sweep, each with unique argument realization options and interpretive p… Show more
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