Agents Expressed by Prepositionless Instrumental Modifying Czech Nouns Derived from Intransitive Verbs

The present paper aims to provide corpus-based description of Czech deverbal nouns that allow for modification by Agent expressed by prepositionless instrumental, A1(Ins). As the starting point we give frequency data of selected nouns derived from transitive verbs. Then we focus on nouns derived from intransitive verbs and show that modification by A1(Ins) is possible not only with nouns derived from verbs that can be passivized, but also with nouns the source verbs of which cannot be changed to passive. The latter issue represents the most contributive finding of the paper; it concerns especially nouns derived from reflexive verbs, both transitive and intransitive. We also improve the up-to-now description by taking into consideration not only Czech nouns derived from verbs by productive means (e.g. domlouvání ‘talking’) but also the non-productively derived ones (e.g. domluva ‘caution’), mostly left aside. Finally, the corpus material also gives an evidence for usage of theoretically ungrammatical constructions in which the second complementation (A2) is omitted on the surface and only A1(Ins) is expressed, e.g. vyhrožování zaměstnavatelem ‘threatening by the employer’, domluva strážníky ‘caution by police officers’; the corpus-based examples lead to the revision of the statement about ungrammaticality of such constructions.