On the syntax of the Agent nouns in Gothic: the case of nd-formations

Abstract

Agent Nouns have attracted a great deal of interest in General Linguistics because of their syntactic and semantic features. As a word class, they are a mixed class with features of nouns and adjectives. These nouns generally transpose by means of, among others, a derivational pattern in which some syntactic particularities of the base verbs are incorporated into the nominal morphosyntax depending on the Agent Noun. In this article we describe and establish a methodology for analyzing the adnominal complementation of Gothic Agent Nouns through one of their most productive suffixes: -nd. For this purpose, we will describe morphologically and semantically the agent nouns formed with this suffix and we will analyze the predicative frames of the base verbs to determine to what extent the complementation of Agent Nouns is restricted to nominalize the Direct Object of the base verb or, as we will see, if this type of nouns can present other types of complements depending on it and what are their lexical-semantic characteristics. The types of adnominal complements are codified in genitive, dative, and prepositional syntagm according to the syntactic level they have in the predication and following a hierarchy of Grammatical Relations.