Re: Terminology query

On Sat, 25 Feb 2006 13:30:30 -0500, Christian Köttl
<christian.koettl@...> wrote:

>> On Feb 24, 2006, at 8:43 AM, Mark J. Reed wrote:
>>> Is there a standard grammatical term for the "doer" form of a verb,
>>> such as English -er/-or or Spanish -dor?  I've been calling it the
>>> "agentive", which may be perfectly cromulent, but if there's a
>>> standard term I'd rather use it.
>>>
>> calling the agent is perfectly respectable; you may wish to look up
>> theta-roles, if you're not familiar with them.
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theta_role
>
> The theta roles are about parts of a sentence and their relation; I
> think Mark asked about derivational morphology, i.e. if someone carves,
> he is a carver. I found the expression "agentive nominaliser" for this,
> and, to refer to Wikipedia again, there is some info on
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agentive .
Isn't there a set of Latin terms containing "nomina agentis", "nomina
patientis", and at least a few others?

I only find the term "nomina agentis" in one place on Wikipedia, in a
discussion of stød in Danish:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_phonology

Google's define: tag isn't much more helpful, and a regular Google leads
to lots of book sellers but no obvious discussion or definition page.

I'm sure I've seen the terms bandied about on this list, though, and
pretty sure elsewhere.




Paul

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