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 matters.