The agent and the causer in the processing race

Psycholinguistics investigates real-time processing of language, a live realisation of theoretical linguistics. Theoretical linguistics introduced external and internal thematic roles, describing their positions in relation to the verb phrase, VP [6;17]), that affect processing. External roles are usually agents, occurring first in common active voice. External roles are absorbed by passive morphology in passive voice, so missing, but implied or added optionally in the ‘by’-phrase. An internal causer or theme role is projected from the post-verb complement to sentence subject instead. Object-experiencer (OE) actives and passives pattern analogously to these agentive sentences when they contain an agent. However, an unusual stative OE subtype has no agent, an internal causer or theme role projected to subject from the post-verb complement in actives [3;9;12;16]. An internal active thematic role cannot be absorbed, so these passives are adjectival (aP [2;3;8;12]).