agentive

Agentive is an adjective used in linguistics and related fields to describe something that relates to an agent—the doer of an action in a sentence. In this sense, an agentive element marks or encodes who performs the action, as opposed to the patient or recipient.

In linguistic description, agentive can refer to several related notions. It may describe a grammatical form or category that marks the agent, such as an agentive case, agentive voice, or agentive noun. Some languages have a dedicated agentive case that marks the agent of a verb, while others use morphological or syntactic devices to identify the agent without a specific case. In many languages, the agent is expressed through a noun or nominalized form—an agentive noun—derived from a verb, such as “writer” from “write” or “teacher” from “teach.”

The term can also describe adjectives or participles that denote agency, or broader notions of agency in semantics. The usage of agentive forms varies across languages and theoretical frameworks, but the core idea remains: the agentive element identifies the agent who performs the action.

Etymology: agentive derives from Latin agere “to do” and agent- “doing, actor.”

Related topics include active voice, grammatical voice, agentive case (where present), agentive nouns, and nominalization.