Our sense of agency and ability to distinguish between intentional and accidental actions are fundamental for social interaction. They allow us to plan and perform joint actions and assign responsibility for our own actions and those of others. Research on the nature of agency and intentions has been very fruitful over the last few decades in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. However, trully new discoveries could be made only when we engage in interdisciplinary discussions. This volume is the result of such discussions.
Julie Goncharov is a post-doctoral researcher at the Seminar for English Philology and the University Center for Text Structures at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen. Her main areas of interest are semantics/pragmatics of natural languages and philosophy of language. Her current projects revolve around questions concerning agency, intentions, free will and their representations in language.
Hedde Zeijlstra is Professor at the Seminar for English Philology at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen. His main interest is the relation between sentence meaning and form: how does the meaning of a sentence follow from its parts, and why are there so many different ways of expressing the same meaning across languages?
Preface Notes on Contributors
Agency in the English Way-Construction’s Constraints Caterina Cacioli Abstract
Keywords
1 Introduction
2 The Way-Construction
3 Attributing Agency
4 Corpus Research and Analysis
5 Conclusions
On Some Epistemic Access Effects Francesco Costantini Abstract
Keywords
1 Introduction
2 Subjunctive Obviation
3 Obviation and de se Attitude Reports
4 Epistemic Access as Source of Obviation
5 Other Expected Outcomes
6 Alternative Analyses
7 Concluding Remarks
Two Semantic Paths to Unintentional Causation Ömer Demirok Abstract
Keywords
1 Introduction
2 Background on Un-agentive Constructions
3 Syntactic Contrasts
4 Interpretational Contrasts
5 Summary of the Claims and Remaining Questions
Letting Structure Speak with Authority: Constraining Agents’ Choices with French laisser Marta Donazzan, Clémentine Raffy, Bridget Copley and Klaus von Heusinger Abstract
Keywords
1 Introduction
2 Theoretical Background
3 Characterising Authority as a Constraint on Choice
4 When Syntax Matters: Structural Constraints on Authority Relations
5 Conclusions
Acknowledgements
Index
Institutes, (academic) libraries, specialists, (post-graduate) students; scholars working in the interface between linguistics, philosophy and psychology.