agentivos

Agentivos are words or constructions that designate the agent—the doer of an action—in a sentence. They form a class of agent nouns or agentive forms used across languages to express who performs the action, sometimes with additional information about authority, intentionality, or role. The concept is central to discussions of morphology, syntax, and semantics, and it often overlaps with the study of voice and valency.

Morphology and cross-language patterns vary. In English, productive agentives commonly take the suffix -er or -or, as in teacher, writer, driver, or actor. Some agentives arise from verb-derived nouns with noun-hood or by back-formation. In Romance languages, agentive nouns frequently appear with suffixes such as -ante or -ente (cantante, estudiante, agente) and with related lexical items. German uses -er and feminine -in to form agent nouns (Lehrer/Lehrerin, Schriftsteller/Schriftstellerin), while other languages rely on separate lexical nouns or nominalizations. In many languages, agentive expressions can also be formed through compounding or using dedicated agent nouns with distinct semantics.

Semantics and syntax of agentivos interact with voice and argument marking. Agentives can encode expected voluntariness, intentionality, or animacy of the agent, though these nuances vary by language. In some systems, the agent is marked by a specific case or syntactic construction (for example, in passive sentences the agent may appear in a by-phrase in English, or a distinct agentive construction in other languages). The study of agentivos thus touches on how languages encode who performs an action, how they derive such nouns, and how agentivity influences sentence structure.