agentiveadj.n.

1840 N.Y. Rev. Apr. 437 Mother, in Irish, matair; compounded of mat, fruit, and the agentive suffix, -air, denotes a fruit producer.

1841 Jrnl. Asiatic Soc. Bengal 10 ii. 1039 The agent [in the Cashmiri language] has a peculiar form, which I have termed the agentive case.

1903 Amer. Anthropologist 5 26 Syntactical Cases and Appositions [in native languages of California]. Agentive, Subjunctive, Objective, Possessive.

1925 E. Sapir in Language 1 49 As Prof. L. Bloomfield points out to me, the agentive -er contrasts with the comparative -er, which allows the adjective to keep its radical form in -ŋg (e.g., long with -ŋ: longer with -ŋg).

1941 E. A. Speiser Introd. Hurrian v. 211 Even the agentive verb is always in included position unless accompanied by the proper associative element.

1961 J. Berko in S. Saporta & J. R. Bastian Psycholinguistics vi. 369/2 Adults unanimously said that a man who zibs is a zibber, using the common agentive pattern.

1970 Jrnl. Linguistics 6 71 Assume a V is generated together with three prepositional phrases in its complement, one in the Objective, one in the Instrumental, and one in the Agentive case.

2007 I. Plag et al. Introd. Eng. Linguistics iii. 92 The English agentive suffix -er..gave rise to many new words in the 20th century, such as..litterer, packager, pager, socialiser.

1854 Jrnl. Indian Archipel. & Eastern Asia 8 229 In Egyptian, as in Coptic, the agentive or subject regularly precedes the predicate.

1905 C. A. Bell Man. Colloq. Tibetan iii. 28 The agentive is employed in place of the nominative with transitive verbs.

1965 Canad. Jrnl. Linguistics 10 117 Agentives are apparently built upon future duratives, not upon imperfectives.

1972 L. R. Palmer Descr. & Compar. Ling. vii. 143 Much the same is true of the insertion of by before NP, for this is nothing more than an instruction on how to form the agentive.

1983 D. L. Gold in Comments on Etymol. 12 37 -ler is a suffix used to form agentives from nouns, e.g., indler ‘surfer’, based on the Yiddish noun ind.

2002 B. Orlove Lines in Water iii. 55 ‘To catch fish’ can easily be turned into ‘fish-catcher’ by the addition of the brief morpheme -q... This suffix, one of the many that Quechua-speakers append to words in their language, is what linguists term the ‘agentive’.