Agentive verbs

[Wolfgang Schulze]

Dear Ron,
it would perhaps be good to know which type of empirical facts you refer 
to. First: Do you think of a lexicon-based or of a usage-based 
distribution? By the first I mean a distributional pattern that is built 
upon the lexical entries of a given language. Usage-based refers to the 
actual use of (here:) verbal concepts in texts and conversation etc.  My 
own impression is that the number of say "non-agentive" verbs is much 
higher with respect to lexicon-based data than to usage-based data.  
Nevertheless, the patterns showing up in usage-based data naturally 
depends from the type of texts at issue. Second: Do you think of a 
purely semantic analysis, that is a classification of verbs based on 
their semantic properties (which always is a bit risky), or do you mean 
a 'visible' classification that emerges from the analysis of 
morphosyntactic behavioral patterns (such as S-Split, causativization 
constraints, TAM-constraints, agreement patterns, case marking etc.)? As 
for concrete data: I can only give you a rough calculus for usage-based 
data from Udi (East Caucasian, corpus size: 100.000 words): Here, we 
have roughly 75 % agentive verbs (in your sense) and 20 % non-agentive 
verbs (the rest is constituted by copula constructions).
Best wishes,
Wolfgang


kuzar at research.haifa.ac.il wrote:
> I believe this is the right forum for this question:
> Is it an empirically confirmed fact that agentive verbs constitute the majority
> of verbs in (a particular?) language? By "agentive verbs" I mean verbs that
> require a human subject exercising volition/intention in performing the action
> of the verb.
> Any statistics?
> Ron Kuzar
>   

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*Prof. Dr. Wolfgang 
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