TY  - JOUR
U1  - Zeitschriftenartikel, wissenschaftlich - begutachtet (reviewed)
A1  - Kretzschmar, Franziska
A1  - Brilmayer, Ingmar
T1  - Zooming in on agentivity: Experimental studies of DO-clefts in German
JF  - Linguistics Vanguard
N2  - 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 protoroles 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.
KW  - Psycholinguistik
KW  - Experimentelle Psychologie
KW  - Thematische Relation
KW  - Empfindung
KW  - Akzeptabilität
KW  - Prototyp <Linguistik>
KW  - Intransitives Verb
KW  - Deutsch
KW  - semantic roles
KW  - agent
KW  - experiencer
KW  - sentience
KW  - acceptability judgements
KW  - role decomposition
KW  - role prototypicality
Y1  - 2020
UN  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-102638
SN  - 2199-174X
SS  - 2199-174X
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2019-0069
DO  - https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2019-0069
N1  - Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.

This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.
VL  - 6
IS  - 1
SP  - 1
EP  - 13
PB  - De Gruyter
CY  - Berlin
ER  -