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Agent-noun polysemy in a cross-linguistic perspective
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Hans Christian Luschützky
Published/Copyright:
December 20, 2011
Abstract
According to a widely held opinion, agent-instrument polysemy in derivational morphology is the result of semantic extension from agent to instrument meaning. In the present paper we set out to explore the cross-linguistic distribution of patterns of polysemy along the agent-instrument axis. It turns out that about forty percent in a sample of 82 languages expressing both agent and instrument meaning by derivational morphology have markers that are polysemous for the categories in question. A closer look at the data reveals, however, that many of these prima-facie cases of agent-instrument polysemy have arisen not by semantic extension from agent to instrument meaning, but in a number of different ways.
Published Online: 2011-12-20
Published in Print: 2011-12
© by Akademie Verlag, Wien, Germany
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Keywords for this article
polysemy;
agent noun;
instrument noun;
cross-linguistic distribution;
diachronic pathways
