Semantic Roles Between Verb and Context: The case of the Agent

In this paper, we examine the interplay between lexical and contextual factors in determining whether the Subject of a predicate will be interpreted as an Agent. We propose a taxonomy of verbs consisting of three main classes – i. verbs with lexical agents, ii. verbs with lexical non-agents, and iii. verbs that are lexically unmarked concerning Agency –, and examine the semantic and syntactic properties of each class utilising corpus evidence. Results show that Agency is better interpreted as a derivative notion and that the assignment of the Agent role is often dependent on contextual clues.