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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.
Lexikonprojektion und Konstruktion: Experimentelle Studien zu Argumentalternationen im Deutschen
(2020)
Debates on lexicalist vs. constructionist modelling of argument alternations are typically based on data from single constructions, each including different types of verbs. Evidence from constructions with an identical set of verb types that systematically differ in their meaning is lacking, even though such evidence is imperative for specifically investigating the dependence of argument alternations on the interaction between construction and lexical meanings. We present two acceptability studies where verb lexeme meanings and constructions - specifically active voice, impersonal passive and the construction with man 'one' in German - vary systematically. Prima facie our results support a constructionist explanation, because each construction exhibits a unique acceptability cline. However, across constructions, an adequate explanation has to consider verb-based lexical meanings. The most plausible explanation is that the semantic features licensed by the construction are matched with the semantic features provided by the verb lexeme.