The Agent/Affectee ambiguity and beyond

This paper investigates sentences whose subject can be interpreted either as an Agent or an Affectee in Japanese and English. It argues that a purely semantic approach (Amano 1995) and a causation-based approach (Kageyama 1996) cannot be maintained as they stand, and shows that a syntactic factor must be involved in determining the distribution of Affectees. Specifically, it proposes a Case-theoretic approach in conjunction with minimal assumptions about the argument structure of verbs. Evidence in favor of this approach comes from languages in which an Agent and an Affectee can co-occur.