Agentive Suffixes and Agent Nouns in Old English

Agentive Suffixes and Agent Nouns in Old English

An agent noun is the cognitive category frequently expressed by agentive affixes (e.g., baker) and the notion of agentivity has been the subject of much discussion in the linguistic literature (Torrego 1996, Fradin 2005, Luschützky and Rainer 2011, Rainer 2015, among others). Despite the wealth of morphological information of agent nouns, there have still been disagreements about the concept of agentivity among scholars, and questions like what semantic features comprise the sense of agentivity, and how agent nouns are different from each other have not been answered yet. In this article, I present a bundle of semantic features composing the sense of agentivity, and attempt to offer a semantic analysis of Old English agent nouns. It is shown that by means of the semantic features, a variety of Old English agent nouns are clearly distinguished from each other, and classified into ten groups on the scale of agentivity. I argue that the similarity or dissimilarity between agent nouns, and between agentive suffixes is systematically captured and well-explained by using the semantic features proposed in the article.