<b>The origin of agent markers</b> . By Enrique L. Palancar. (Studia typologica 5.) Berlin: Akademie, 2002. Pp. 310. ISBN 3050037679 €74.80.
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: The origin of agent markers by Enrique L. Palancar Gary Holton The origin of agent markers. By Enrique L. Palancar. (Studia typological 5.) Berlin: Akademie, 2002. Pp. 310. ISBN 3050037679 €74.80. It is well known that the case markers used to encode agents may also be used to encode other oblique cases. For example, markers of passive agents may be homophonous with instrumental case markers, and ergative case markers may be homophonous with ablative markers. Within a particular language diachronic explanations for such case syncretism (as Palancar uses the term) are readily available. Crosslinguistic typological generalizations, however, are more difficult to extract. In this painstakingly researched volume, P investigates the grammaticization of agent markers across the world’s languages, noting some intriguing universal tendencies in the encoding of passive agents and ergative case markers. P’s central contribution is to recognize that agent markers do not necessarily represent the realization of a universal Agent category. In order to account for the common semantics of agent markers, P instead introduces the notion of ‘Energizer’, defined as ‘the entity to which the kinetic transmission of the energetic frame is ascribed’ (71). Several chapters are devoted to the development of theoretical machinery necessary to explain the realization of the energizer in various languages. Remaining chapters exemplify the proposal with data from particular languages. P’s investigation draws on a random sample of 148 languages, containing 176 distinct agent markers. While the sample size is impressive, the choice of data appears somewhat opportunistic and does not reflect an attempt to achieve a representative genetic or areal sample. For example, the language sample includes data from six different varieties of Eskimo-Aleut. Four of these are dialects of Inuit, and none are from the Aleut branch of the family. The other major North American language family, Athabaskan (or Na-Dene), is not represented at all in the sample. Moreover, the choice of sources for language data in the sample is of rather variable quality. Central Alaskan Yup’ik data, for example, are extracted from a theoretical study of Canadian Inuktitut rather than from a (readily available) reference grammar of Yup’ik. Yet these are minor quibbles given the sheer quantity of data and the reliability of its citation. Curiously, P’s sample explicitly omits languages with active/agentive systems. While noting that this omission is unfortunate, P offers no further explanation as to why active/agentive systems have been excluded from the study (15). Given that such systems most clearly grammaticize the agent role, one might hope that they would be included in a future study. Unfortunately, typological studies do not always make for easy reading, and this book is no exception. But P is quick to recognize this and helpfully suggests sections of the book that can be skipped by the impatient reader (6). P’s style is unremittingly humble, giving equal time to competing explanations. As a result, this book will be useful both to those interested in the nature of semantic [End Page 226] universals and to those interested in gaining a better understanding of the sheer range of possible encoding of agents in the world’s languages. Gary Holton University of Alaska Fairbanks Copyright © 2007 Linguistic Society of America
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it