Agentivity

Abstract In light of the ongoing public controversy surrounding fashion sustainability, this paper sets out to identify misalignments that relate to the definitions of sustainable fashion. It does so by examining the discourse of different agents in this polylogical argumentation - fashion companies and the European Parliament as well as citizens, small brands and NGOs - as revealed through documents and tweets published online. Our findings show misalignments in the opening stage of the argumentative discussion at the level of explicit and implicit definitions of sustainability as well as in how the agents responsible are discursively portrayed. We argue that the existence of these misalignments may explain the ongoing controversy surrounding sustainable fashion: the different actors do not share univocal starting points and representations of this phenomenon. Methodologically, this paper also advances research on argumentative polylogues, by demonstrating a method for comparing argumentation by different actors using different data sources.

Este artículo de opinión está destinado a traer la información que rodea a los freelancers. Estudiando cada una de sus etapas desde el origen del freelance hasta como afectará el freelance en la sociedad. El propósito es entender que es este nuevo paradigma laboral y acceder a nuevas formas de ver el mercado laboral. Durante este artículo expondré porcentajes, ejemplos reales donde se han realizado estudios sobre esta temáticapara que sea más sencillo de entender y a la vez ver que es algo real y no es un fenómeno aislado dentro del mercado. El mercado freelance es totalmente contrario al mercado tradicional por lo que entender cada concepto como una marca personal, la fundación de grupos y la creación de los contratos es importante para entender como funciona este nuevo sistema.

The so-called Unnacusative Hypothesis or Split Intransitivity entails the existence of two kinds of intransitive verbs (unergative and unnacusative), a gradual semantic distinction, associated to features of telicity or agentivity and reflected –to a greater or lesser extent– in certain morpho-syntactic behaviors of languages. Well then, taking into account the crosslinguistic studies on split intransitivity, my purpose is to show that this distinction between the two basic types of intransitivity may not only be extended to Latin but can also help us to understand such apparently disparate phenomena as the extension of the internal accusative or cognate object (vitam vivere), the formation of agent nouns in –tor or the impersonal passivization with intransitive verbs (acriter pugnatur).

The present paper reports the results of an acceptability judgement test designed to test two hypotheses: first, that the Russian 3pl impersonal construction is affected by agent prominence, i.e. verbs implying a more prominent agent are more acceptable than verbs implying an agent with fewer agentivity features; second, that movement as an agentivity feature should be conceptualized as a gradual category, thus making a fast-moving referent a more prominent agent than one moving slowly. The former hypothesis could be verified, the latter falsified.

Whether morphologically coded or not, the seemingly secondary passivity of many intransitive constructs is not always more “retarded” in view of agentivity or eventuality than the activity of their corresponding active-transitive ones. When a cake bakes well, for instance, it is possible that a given line of cakes is endowed with the capability of being baked with little or no difficulty on the part of the Agent. Without the previously licensed attribute of the food, few
cooks will find it easy to bake the cake adroitly. Likewise, we will have difficulty peeling an onion whose skin is stubborn. The onion which peels well allows you to peel it well. Very
often, the Theme precedes the Agent.

Key words: computational semantics, homogeneous function, medio-passive verb, middle verb.

Since Belletti & Rizzi (1988), there has been a considerable debate over whether object experiencer psychological verbs (OEPVs) are able to form verbal passives or not. Some authors (Grimshaw, 1990; Legendre, 1993) agree with Belletti & Rizzi (1988) in considering that OEPVs are unaccusative and, that therefore, they cannot form verbal passives, but only adjectival passives. Other authors (Pesetsky, 1995; Bouchard, 1995) argue that OEPVs are normal transitive verbs and, that therefore, they are able to form verbal passives. Related to this, Landau (2002) distinguishes two types of languages: (i) A languages (e.g. English, Dutch, Finnish), in which (eventive) OEPVs are allowed to form verbal passives, and (ii) B Languages, where OEPVs are only allowed to form adjectival passives. However, as Landau himself acknowledges, most of the tests that are supposed to distinguish verbal and adjectival passives are not very clear-cut.
Interestingly, because of the alternation between the two copulas ser and estar, Spanish provides such a clear-cut diagnostic: (eventive) verbal passives are formed with ser, while adjectival passives are formed with estar (Marín, 2001). In this presentation, I will show that, according to the aforementioned criterion, Spanish OEPVs fall into two groups: (i) those such as asustar ‘frighten’ or molestar ‘annoy’, which are able to form both verbal passives and adjectival passives, and (ii) those such as preocupar ‘worry’ or aburrir ‘bore’, which are only able to form adjectival passives. The existence of these two groups is clearly related to agentivity: asustar-verbs that have an animate subject are agentive, while preocupar-verbs are never agentive. Contrary to the received view, I will demonstrate that these two classes do not differ with respect to aspect: both denote inchoative states (Marín & McNally, 2005; 2011).

RESUMEN El presente artículo tiene como objetivo revisar el estatus de la construcción compleja hacer + infinitivo, no considerada perífrasis para la mayoría de autores, parcialmente considerada así para otros y perifrástica para un tercer grupo. Analizaremos las pruebas que sustentan esta variedad de opiniones y ofreceremos una conclusión acerca del uso de la construcción con función supletiva en determinados contextos y como forma de expresión analítica de ciertos ítems léxicos de carácter causativo, para lo cual consideraremos patrones como la bieventividad y como la temporalidad. Ilustraremos esta última función como creadora de equivalencia semántica mediante la controvertida discusión acerca de si matar es hacer morir, revisando para ello las teorías más conocidas acerca de su no igualación y elaborando una propuesta alternativa. ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to review the status of the Spanish construction 'hacer + infinitive', that is not considered as a periphrasis by the greater part of the bibliography, but partially considered as a periphrasis for others and also defined as fully periphrastic for a third group of authors. We will analyze the proofs that cause this variety of opinions and we will offer a conclusion about the use of the construction with a suppletive function in some contexts and like an analytic expression form of certain lexical items that presents Causativity, using some patterns like bieventivity and temporality. We will illustrate this last function as creator of semantic equivalence by means of the controversial discussion about if kill is cause to die, reviewing the most famous theories about the no equivalence between them and proposing an alternative for it.

The Polish-no/-to construction is an arb, i.e. a human impersonal with a similar meaning as the impersonal pronouns man in German or on in French or the 3 impersonal in Russian. The common view that it can be formed from virtually all verbs as long as the referent is human is here contested by an acceptability judgement test. It shows that verbs assigning more agentivity features to the subject are significantly better than verbs assigning fewer agentivity features, and completely un-agentive verbs are just as bad as inanimate referents. This reveals a prominence relation. The details of the findings indicate that the-no/-to construction behaves in a similar but nonetheless different way from other arbs and that the list of agentivity features has to be revised in order to model the prominence relation exactly.

Several Tibeto-Burman languages show a peculiar pattern of distribution of copulas and/or finite verb forms, in which one set occurs with first person subjects in statements, second person subjects in questions, and in complement clauses of verba dicendi when the complement and main clause subjects are coreferential, and another set in all other contexts. When the evidence for and against reconstructing the system at the branch or family level is assessed, it appears that this “conjunct/disjunct” pattern is a recent secondary innovation in all of the languages in which it is found. It probably developed independently at least twice, in Tibetan and Akha; its occurrence in other languages may represent Tibetan influence.

The article discusses how split intransitivity phenomenon is observed in Turkish in terms of aspectual notions such as agentivity and telicity; different grammatical constructions such as impersonal passives and adjectival passives, and derivational morphology. It observes that agentivity is the key factor affecting split intransitivity in Turkish alongside telicity and these determine the unaccusative-unergative distinction of verbs of manner of motion, verbs of emission and reflexive verbs in Turkish. The article proposes that verbs of emission seem to be unaccusative while reflexives behave more like unergatives. Our findings imply that variable behavior of intransitive verbs can be handled under an event structure analysis where different functional heads give theta role to a NP merged in their domain. Thus, there is no need for a lexical derivation or rule for accounting the facts on unaccusativity.

J'interroge la distinction entre universalisme et particularisme au regard du concept de biographie. Est-il vrai que l'universalisme moral ne prenne pas en compte le sujet dans sa complexité biographique ? J'essaie de montrer que la situation est plus complexe et que cette discussion demande de clarifier ce qui est un détail et ce qui est un fragment d'une vie.
http://biographysociety.org/2016/09/30/interdisciplinary-colloquium-oct-2017-la-verite-dune-vie-biography-verity/

I defend the view that the experience of resistance gives us a direct phenomenal access to the mind-independence of perceptual objects. In the first part, I address a humean objection against the very possibility of experiencing existential mind-independence. The possibility of an experience of mind-independence being secured, I argue in the second part that the experience of resistance is the only kind of experience by which we directly access existential mind-independence.

O estudo de agentividades e identidades em um ambiente de sala de aula, realizadas por meio de decisões performáticas compreendidas como estratégias de negociação de posturas discursivas por parte dos alunos, se mostra relevante ante a possibilidade de um melhor conhecimento de como se dá o embate de valores socioculturais numa perspectiva de micro-resistências a relações de poder presentes nesse tipo de ação social. A linguagem como uma construção dialógica e intersubjetiva, atrelada à natureza interacional da ação social, é tomada como pressuposto para a análise das agentividades e identidades no ambiente de fala institucional em uma sala de inglês língua adicional (ILA) – turma do 6º ano do ensino fundamental em uma escola pública. Com essa compreensão, explica-se a relação entre componentes de escalas locais e translocais como recursos indiciais na conformação das decisões performáticas.

To appear in Jessica Coon, Diane Massam, Lisa Travis (eds). Oxford Handbook of Ergativity. OUP Press.

A number of Tibeto-Burman languages exhibit morphological ergative alignment, while others clearly do not.  In these languages, matters of information structure determine core argument marking. Specifically, both A and S marking may be used to indicate topic, contrastive topic, broad focus, and/or contrastive focus.  It is most often A or S, not P, that is assigned such status and between A and S, it is most often A that takes marking.  Preference for topic or focus marking on A creates the impression of ergative alignment, but an ergative alignment analysis is untenable as S may be marked under the same conditions and with the same morpheme as A.  Considerations of discourse-level clause interpretation in Tibetan, Meitei, and Burmese show that information structure not transitivity determines A and S marking.  The presence or absence of marking based on information structure is characterized as “unique differential marking”, distinguishing it from the differential marking observed in ergative and accusative alignment systems.

In the paper, we focus on the verb myśleć ‘think’ in Polish and attempt to find out whether there is any correspondence between the semantic features of the subject and verb grammatical constructions. First, senses of the verb will be identified, and then their subjects will be assigned the four agentive features. Next, on the basis of corpus data the actual patterns of sense use will be searched for by means of an exploratory tool, i.e. Multiple Correspondence Analysis. The tool should help us to see the correlation between the senses and the features. Positive results of our study would confirm the general cognitive assumption that syntactic structures are meaningful, rather than arbitrary and unpredictable.

The paper deals with impersonal constructions like Polish mówiono, Serbo-Croatian govorilo se and Russian govorili ‘they said’. Grammatical descriptions agree that these constructions require an implicit human agent and are ungrammatical without one. However, it is shown here that these impersonals are not always good even with a human agent because their grammaticality also depends on the verb. Both acceptability judgement tests and corpus studies show a clear agentivity cline: The more features of agent prominence the verb entails, the more acceptable (and relatively the more frequent) the construction is.

Français : Il est convenu de regrouper sous l’étiquette de « littérature hors du livre » les pratiques qui remettent en question le modèle institutionnel dominant d’une littérature centrée sur le livre. Il s'agit toutefois de savoir comment une telle critique est non seulement menée, mais également opérante. Adoptant une démarche pragmatiste, ce texte interroge l'agentivité collective des pratiques d'écriture hors du livre. Il fait l'hypothèse que celle-ci passe par la construction de dispositifs fictionnels qui fonctionnent comme des opérateurs d’expériences de pensée instituant nos actions communes futures.

English: It is agreed to label together as « off-book literature » practices which contest the prevailing institutional model of a book-centered literature. It however matters to know how such a critic is miscarried out but also how it is operating. Adopting a pragmatist approach, this text interrogates the collective agentivity of off-book writing practices. It assumes that the latter goes through constructing fictional devices which work as operators for experiences of thought that will shape our collective future actions.

This paper presents some hypotheses of research on the spiritual direction of the Frenchspeaking Protestants between the end of the Sixteenth century and the Seventeenth century. It is placed at the crossroads of two historiographical issues: the question of the impact of the Reformation on women’s religious life, and Protestant piety and spirituality. It involved new approaches to cultural history and a gender analysis to better understand the social dynamics of the confessional conflict. This perspective will be illustrated firstly from examination of the recent trends of research on the religious confrontation in France; secondly, it will be informed by the analysis of a polemical print, a conversion narrative concerning a Huguenot woman of the community of Charenton, the reformed Church of Paris, who abjured Protestantism for Catholicism in the late 1620s but choose to revert to her first confession of Faith.

Résumé

Cadre de la recherche : Le nombre de personnes déplacées dans le monde s’élève aujourd’hui à 82,4 millions (UNHCR, 2021). L’UNHCR demeure critique des faibles quotas accordés aux personnes réfugiées au Canada et conseille depuis 2018 d’accorder la priorité d’accueil aux populations les plus vulnérables, notamment les femmes seules avec enfants qui sont au cœur de cette recherche. Si elle incarne une réalité variée dans les pays d’origine, la monoparentalité en contexte de migration forcée devient synonyme de précarité, d’instabilité et d’inégalités sociales et économiques, et à plus forte raison en contexte de pandémie mondiale.

Objectifs : L’objectif est de s’interroger sur les stratégies que ces femmes mettent en place pour s’ancrer dans la société québécoise et pour faire face aux défis qui leur sont propres.

Méthodologie : L’article prend appui sur des données recueillies par entrevues semi-dirigées auprès de trois femmes réfugiées en situation de monoparentalité à Montréal.

Résultats : Ces mères doivent jongler entre émotions tumultueuses, défis quotidiens et responsabilités familiales. Leurs parcours illustrent les manières dont se superposent résilience et agentivité dans la gestion des dynamiques familiales ainsi que dans les expériences d’installation.

Conclusions : Les transformations familiales et les défis de la migration forcée poussent les mères réfugiées à reconstruire non seulement leur chez-soi, mais aussi leur individualité de femme, et de mère, ce qui remet en cause les perspectives parfois réductrices sur la maternité et la résilience.

Contribution : La présentation des données issues de cette recherche permet de nuancer les concepts de résilience et d’agentivité en cernant leur complexité et leur ambivalence, tout en révélant comment les mères se reconstruisent après une expérience de migration forcée.

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Title: " 'I was scared, but now this is my home': the journeys of single-parent refugee women in Montreal"

Abstract

Research Framework: The number of displaced people in the world now stands at 82.4 million. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) remains critical of the low quotas granted to refugees in Canada and since 2018 one of its recommendations has been to prioritize vulnerable populations, in particular single women with children, who are at the heart of this research. In the context of forced migration, being a single mother often rhymes with precarity, instability and socio-economic inequalities, which have all been dramatically multiplied with the pandemic.

Objectives: The objective is to examine the strategies these women put into place to anchor themselves in Quebec society, and to face the daily challenges in their lives.

Methodology: The article is based on data collected through semi-structured interviews with Montreal-based single refugee mothers.

Results: These mothers find themselves juggling between tumultuous emotions, daily challenges, and familial responsibilities. Their journeys illustrate the ways in which resilience and agency intersect in the management of family dynamics as well as in settlement experiences.

Conclusions: Family transformations and the challenges of forced migration push refugee mothers to rebuild not only their home, but also their individuality as women and mothers, which challenges the often-reductive perspectives on motherhood and resilience.

Contribution: The results presented allow to nuance the concepts of resilience and agency while highlighting their ambivalence and their complexity. They also reveal the ways refugee mothers rebuild their lives after experiencing forced migration.

Highly frequent bound pronouns are very likely to undergo segmental erosion (Heine & Song 2011). These processes may, in turn, lead to the emergence of inflectional tone in tonal languages. To illustrate these processes, this paper analyzes allomorphy in dependent pronouns in Sà'án Sàvǐ ñà Yukúnanǐ. Among Mixtec languages, Sà'án Sàvǐ ñà Yukúnanǐ presents a particularly complex pronominal system: it distinguishes different degrees of formality, shows considerable allomorphy, and presents distinct sets of subject and object enclitics. This paper focuses on the grammaticalization processes of personal pronouns in Sà'án Sàvǐ ñà Yukúnanǐ, the extent to which they undergo segmental erosion and the use of tone as a person marking strategy. We note how the distribution of segmental erosion among personal pronouns in Sà'án Sàvǐ ñà Yukúnanǐ mirrors Silverstein's (1976) agent hierarchy.

Belmar, Guillem, Alonso Vásquez-Aguilar & Jeremías Salazar. 2021. Agent hierarchy and pronominal allomorphy in Sàꞌán Sàvǐ ñà Yukúnanǐ. In Caitie Coons, Gabriella Chronis, Sofia Pierson, Venkat Govindarajan (eds.) Proceedings of the 20th Meeting Texas Linguistic Society, 21-38. Austin: University of Texas at Austin, Department of linguistics.

This paper shows how a society imagines human individuals and their power to act
upon spirits both ritually and materially. Based on the author’s fieldwork (from 1994 to 2019), it
analyzes the emic concept onnir, which is omnipresent in the daily activities and the past and
present collective/individual rituals of Siberian Evenki and Even. Each human owns a specific
fluctuating “charge made of spirits” and an “active imprint” that empowers the human to act,
perform rituals, develop talents, and create. Even after death, this “imprint” affects everything
and everyone a human ever touched. Onnir defines the interrelations between the individual, the
spirits of his or her own “charge,” and the spirits of the universe in an “active agent”-“patient”
relationship. This paper contributes to studies of the notions of the individual, “playing” as a ritual
means, the acceptance/rejection of neoshamans, neorituals, and the (ritual) agency of ordinary
individuals.

According to both philological and typological literature, the Polish -no/-to construction (as in Tańczono do białego rana ‘There was dancing until dawn’) implies an arbitrary human subject/agent (e.g. Siewierska 1988: 269–275; Rivero & Sheppard 2001: 140), i.e. the construction is restricted to implicit subjects that are ranked as [human] on Silverstein’s [1976] animacy scale (cf. Jabłońska 2008). Kibort (2008: 270, 272) argues that the default human reference can be overridden in the Polish reflexive impersonal passive but not in the -no/-to construction. However, these descriptions are inappropriate in two respects: a) The construction sometimes does occur with non-humans (e.g. animals, machines). b) Even with humans, this construction is not uniformly grammatical for all verbs (e.g. ?Migotano, bo pot pokrył ciała ‘There was shimmering because the bodies were covered in sweat’). My hypothesis therefore is that acceptability and use of the -no/-to construction depend on verb semantics rather than animacy as a nominal category. More specifically, there is a prominence relation based on privative features of agentivity understood as a multi-dimensional space of features (dynamicity, volitionality, control, sentience, self-propelled movement, etc.) in the sense of Dowty (1991) and Primus (2011). This hypothesis is tested using corpus analyses and a questionnaire study among native speakers. It can be compared with results for the German man construction and impersonal passive.

Dowty, David R. 1991. Thematic proto-roles and argument selection. Language 67(3). 547–619.
Jabłońska, Patrycja. 2008. Silverstein’s hierarchy and Polish argument structure. In Marc Richards & Andrej Malchukov (eds.), Scales, 221–245. Leipzig: Universität Leipzig, Institut für Linguistik.
Kibort, Anna. 2008. Impersonals in Polish: An LFG perspective. Transactions of the Philological Society 106(2). 246–289.
Primus, Beatrice. 2011. Animacy and telicity: Semantic constraints on impersonal passives. Lingua 121(1). 80–99.
Rivero, Marìa Luisa & Milena Milojević Sheppard. 2001. On impersonal se / sie in Slavic. In Gerhild Zybatow, Uwe Junghanns, Grit Mehlhorn & Luka Szucsich (eds.), Current issues in formal Slavic linguistics, 137–147. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Siewierska, Anna. 1988. The passive in Slavic. In Masayoshi Shibatani (ed.), Passive and voice, 243–289. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Silverstein, Michael. 1976. Hierarchy of features and ergativity. In Pieter Muysken & Henk van Riemsdijk (eds.), Features and projections, 163–232. Dordrecht: Foris.

The sentence “The ship confronted the storm,” must be interpreted nonliterally since
confronting something requires intention. This sentence represents Entailment Transfer
Metonymy (ETM), a previously undescribed variant of me tonymy. Unlike other metonymy
variants, with ETM, neither an NP nor a predicate undergoes semantic change. Instead, a literal
subject NP satisfies the verb’s requirement for an agent argument, while an entity evoked by the
referent of that NP (e.g. the ship’s crew) satisfies the intentionality entailment imposed by the
verb.
Experiment 1 examined readers’ judgments for rationale clauses requiring a
grammatically available intentional agent to show that nonliteral interpretation of ETMs
preserves the literal meaning of subject NPs. Experiment 2 provides indirect evidence that
readers may to construct Entailment Transfer metonyms soon after encountering the verb. The
results of these two experiments demonstrate that ETM can enable figurative interpretation, not
through meaning change but by changing the role that semantic information plays in the
interpretation of the sentence.