The linguistic representations of agency in causal chains

This article examines a few Talmyan claims (Talmy 2000: 471) about the morphosyntactic features of agency in causal situations. Talmy proposes a basic agentive construction SR RESULTed FROM Sa as well as a distinction between Agent and Author for the semantic organization of agency. Narratives were elicited from a set of 20 video clips of real situations; 50 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese were interviewed to set up a closed corpus of 1000 agentive causal sentences. They indicate that Talmy's claims about agency can be supported, while his claims about the syntactic structures cannot. This article further proposes a causal model for the semantic organization of agency. It is concluded that there does not exist a universal pattern for representing agentive situations, and the semantic structure of agency can be determined using the causal model of agency.