12.04.2022 Stefan Schnell

The different treatment of agent- and patient-like participants in event apprehension and expression has been a focus of theoretical and typological research in human language grammars as well as in psycho- and neurolinguistic research on sentence processing. 

In this talk I review recent corpus-linguistic studies across typologically diverse languages that complement these studies by bringing to the fore a range of contrasting features between agentive and patientive arguments in discourse that have been taken to influence the evolution of their encoding in diverse languages’ grammars. I will also give an outlook on planned corpus-based studies that contribute more directly to differences in their planning during discourse production.