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In this monograph the author probes the fundamental nature of the concept of agency and its importance to human language and cognition. Whereas previous studies focused on grammatical manifestations this original work addresses such issues as the strong relationship between agency and responsibility, a philosophical interpretation of the concept of agency and a variety of epistemic attitudes towards agency that strongly influence our view of the world. Different cultures and languages process and express agency differently. To illustrate the co-relation between the linguistic expressions of agency and cultural stereotypes that lurk behind individual natural languages, the author analyses Japanese and English parallel corpora. It is shown that English tends to highlight agency in expressing actions and events, whereas Japanese largely obfuscates agency through impersonalising potential agents. Through the case studies on these languages this book sheds light on the close connection between language, thought and culture and contributes to the resurging interest in linguistic relativity.

Grammar, Comparative and general --- Agent nouns --- Animacy --- Subjectless constructions --- Grammar --- 801.56 --- 801.56 Syntaxis. Semantiek --- Syntaxis. Semantiek --- Impersonal constructions (Grammar) --- Subjectless constructions (Grammar) --- Animacy (Grammar) --- Agent-nouns --- Impersonal constructions --- Syntax --- Animateness --- Grammatical categories --- Noun --- Agent nouns. --- Animacy. --- Subjectless constructions. --- Linguistics --- Philology --- Grammar, Comparative and general - Agent nouns --- Grammar, Comparative and general - Animacy --- Grammar, Comparative and general - Subjectless constructions

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This book explains a well-known puzzle that helped catalyze the establishment of generative syntax: how children tease apart the different syntactic structures associated with sentences like John is easy/eager to please. The answer lies in animacy: taking the premise that subjects are animate, the book argues that children can exploit the occurrence of an inanimate subject as a cue to a non-canonical structure, in which that subject is displaced (the book is easy/*eager to read). The author uses evidence from a range of linguistic subfields, including syntactic theory, typology, language processing, conceptual development, language acquisition, and computational modeling, exposing readers to these different kinds of data in an accessible way. The theoretical claims of the book expand the well-known hypotheses of Syntactic and Semantic Bootstrapping, resulting in greater coverage of the core principles of language acquisition. This is a must-read for researchers in language acquisition, syntax, psycholinguistics and computational linguistics.

Language acquisition. --- Grammar, Comparative and general --- Language and languages --- Syntax --- Animacy (Grammar) --- Acquisition of language --- Developmental linguistics --- Developmental psycholinguistics --- Language development in children --- Psycholinguistics, Developmental --- Interpersonal communication in children --- Psycholinguistics --- Animacy. --- Syntax. --- Animateness --- Grammatical categories --- Acquisition --- Frames (Linguistics) --- Linguistics. --- Substitution frames (Linguistics) --- Syntactic frames (Linguistics) --- Linguistic analysis (Linguistics) --- Linguistic science --- Science of language