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Variable agentivity: Polysemy or underspecification

Paper · 2024 · Malka Rappaport Hovav and Beth Levin

Summary

The paper asks why many English verbs that usually take an intentional, animate subject also accept inanimate, non-intentional ones (e.g., a branch sweeping a window). Is this because one sense leaves agentivity open, or because the verb has two related senses? The authors study a single verb, sweep, using a random sample of physical (non-figurative) uses drawn from COCA.

They find that sweep has two senses:

  • Basic sense. Something moves along a surface and exerts force through contact. This sense is neutral about agentivity, and an agentive reading for animate subjects comes from pragmatic inference.
  • Broom sense. This specialized sense builds the broom into the meaning. It is always agentive and behaves like a routine goal-directed activity.

The authors give an event structure for each sense. They show that each sense's syntax and interpretation follow from general argument-realization and composition principles. So both underspecification and motivated polysemy are needed for one verb. Inanimate-subject uses without any result also undercut the "resultative restriction," a claim common in little-v analyses.

Key points

  • Data: a random COCA sample of sweep. Figurative subjects such as emotions, fads and gazes are excluded.
  • The two senses:
    • basic-sweep: unspecified for agentivity, with agentivity added by implicature (following Holisky 1987 and Van Valin & Wilkins 1996, who use an "effector" role).
    • broom-sweep: obligatorily agentive and permits unspecified objects.
  • Where broom-sweep comes from: an established process that lexicalizes an instrument, fixing an event participant to the concept of a broom. That process usually yields denominal verbs, but not in this case. The verb bake shows a similar split.
  • Against the resultative restriction: an example of willow branch tips brushing the ground has an inanimate subject and no result. It counters both Schäfer's (2012) resultative restriction and Folli & Harley's (2008) teleological-capability refinement.
  • Not regular polysemy: the two senses cannot be co-predicated, which separates this case from regular (Apresjan-style) polysemy. Resultatives such as "The wind swept the fields bare" are left for future work.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Treat a verb's most typical use as possibly a specialized sense rather than its core meaning, and check this against the full range of corpus uses.
  • I2. Agentivity can be a defeasible inference triggered by animacy, not a fixed role entailment; adverbs like "accidentally" with a human subject show it can be cancelled.
  • I3. Lexicalizing an instrument narrows a sense, and routine goal-oriented activity explains why the object may be dropped ("Matt swept" means he swept with a broom).
  • I4. Co-predication tests are used to tell motivated verbal polysemy apart from regular polysemy.
  • I5. A single abstract event structure (motion along a surface with force via contact) is shared by agentive and non-agentive uses.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): Verb-class knowledge could store a neutral core sense plus specialized subsenses, so non-prototypical uses (a branch sweeping a window) still map to a sensible frame.
  • I2 (frames): The prag crate could assign a neutral effector-like role and add "intentional" as a cancellable implicature when the subject is animate, keeping the reasoning explainable.
  • I3 (world): When an object is omitted, the world builder could fill in an implied instrument and a default surface for broom-type senses instead of leaving the slot empty.
  • I4 (learn): Evaluation sets could include zeugma-style negative controls to check that sense disambiguation does not wrongly merge distinct verb senses.
  • I5 (back): Generation could rely on one event template and choose subject type freely, producing both agentive and natural-force paraphrases from the same meaning graph.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Stanford UniversityStanford · United States434 works · 314,419 citations🎓Hebrew University of JerusalemJerusalem · Israel65 works · 9,387 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 870 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Lexical semantics & word embeddings · 63 works

Cite

Cite as Malka Rappaport Hovav and Beth Levin. 2024. Variable agentivity: Polysemy or underspecification. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.10774

@article{hovav2024variable,
  title = {{Variable agentivity: Polysemy or underspecification}},
  author = {Malka Rappaport Hovav and Beth Levin},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.10774},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.10774}
}

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