Variable agentivity: Polysemy or underspecification?

The ontological kinds of participant the paper distinguishes.

The source of a participant's energy.

Whether a participant manipulates instruments: an agent, or a machine designed to carry out an agent's activity autonomously.

A sense of a verb of motion and sustained contact: whether the moving entity of its event structure is lexically saturated by an instrument, and whether the sense names a culturally recognized routine activity, which licenses the unspecified object frame.

Basic-sweep: an entity moves across a surface while imparting a force to it through contact.

Broom-sweep: the moving entity is a broom, and sweeping with one is a routine activity.

An event described by a sense: the kind of the moving entity and the kind of the causer, when there is one.

A saturated sense fixes the moving entity to an instrument, and an entity that draws its energy from a user moves only under the control of an agent, who must be expressed.

A sense is agentive when every well-formed event it describes has a causer that manipulates instruments.

Unspecified objects are licensed by senses naming culturally recognized routine activities of agents, so a routine sense is agentive.

The grammatically relevant predicates of the event structure, one of which determines argument realization.

The syntactic positions the principles assign.

What the principles require of a participant's expression.

The requirements on the moving entity, the path, the surface and the causer.

An effector is an external argument: the causer, when the event has one.

The realization principles applied to an event with respect to the determining predicate. Simple motion along a path is expressed via a small clause whose subject is the moving entity and whose predicate is the path, the surface being the object of the path's preposition if expressed; a saturated moving entity is unavailable for syntactic expression, so the motion predicate cannot determine realization. A force recipient is an internal argument, omissible only for a routine activity. A self-energetic force bearer is an effector and hence external; one that draws its energy from the causer sits in a with phrase, optionally when the sense lexicalizes it.

The positions in which a participant surfaces.

Where a position surfaces: the subject of a small clause is the object of a transitive clause and the subject of an unaccusative one.

A requirement met by a surface slot.

The slots of the moving entity, the surface, the causer and the path in a sentence.

Whether the sentence has an external argument, the causer as subject.

A realization met by a sentence's slots.

The sentences describing an event when the given predicate determines realization.

The north wind swept the open tundra: the moving entity as subject and the surface as object.

The harpist swept the strings with a bow: the causer as subject, the surface as object and the moving entity in a with phrase.

I swept the terrace: the causer as subject and the surface as object, the moving entity unexpressed.

Yesterday, I swept in the morning: the causer alone.

The wind swept the fires through the top growth: the causer as subject, the moving entity as object and the surface in a directional PP.

Fire swept through their home: the moving entity as subject and the surface in a directional PP.

The event structure (42) of basic-sweep, which broom-sweep keeps (76).

The causativized event structure (50) of the transitive+PP frame, in which a cause brings about the activity (42).

The resultative restriction: a subject that is not an agent selects a small clause, which here can only be the path.

The verbs of the paper's examples.

The verbs by their paperFeatures labels.

The senses by their paperFeatures labels: a free moving entity, an instrument lexicalized as the moving entity, and such an instrument in a routine activity.

The kinds by their paperFeatures labels.

The slots by their paperFeatures labels.

A participant's slot, unexpressed when the row names none.

The causer's kind, none when the row names none.

An example of the paper: its verb, the event it describes, the slots of the participants, and the judgment.

A datum read into its row.

The paper's examples.