Agentlessness in the hands of professional translation

Abstract

The school of thought revolving round semantic functions of Noun Phrases, which was initiated by Fillmore (1968), has been developed by next generations of linguists (Cruse 2000, Dixon 1991, Downing, Locke 1995). It defines agent as “any entity that is capable of operating on itself or others, usually to bring about some change in the location or properties of itself or others.“ (Downing and Locke 1995: 114). Prototypical agents are human and are characterized by such properties as animacy, intention, motivation, responsibility and the use of one’s own energy to cause the event or trigger the process. What actually is of interest of the author of the presentation is the situations where discourse is systematically deprived of agents. What this research focuses on is the constructions where the presence of the agent is precluded.