Consider the following:
1. (a) The rain made me late.
(b) The fire destroyed the village.
(c) That shirt is just killing it.The expressions in (1) are causatives in the sense outlined earlier. At least, (a) and (b) are causatives. (c) is a bit trickier—but whether or not we’d call that shirt an agonist in Talmy’s sense, we can recognize it as an agent: the shirt is doing something.
The three expressions differ in verb semantics. (a) is a transitive light verb causative, the verb formed of a generic action (*make*) plus an adverb in a fixed position (following the object, preceding any complements, as in You’ll make me late for my call) and with a sense fixed by convention. (b) is a transitive lexical causative—the morph destroy conveys, on its own, the sense that the agent, the fire, has effected change in the world through its action on a patient, the village. (c) represents what functional syntacticists call an unergative construction: though that shirt is clearly an agent, there is no corresponding patient, nothing—at least, on the surface—that the shirt is acting on in virtue of killing it. The it is either an expletive object in the same sense that the it in It rained yesterday is an expletive subject—or perhaps you could construe the it as part of the verb and posit a distinct entry in our lexicon for kill it.
To my ear, none of the expressions in (1) sounds marked. There is nothing in the attribution of agency to rain or fire that would lead me to expect my listeners to do a double-take. (1c) requires a bit more thought: What is being described here? What kind of agency is being attributed to that shirt? To my ear it is that of making an impression on (implicit) viewers. This is a distinctly social form of agency, and in this regard (1c) differs from (1a–b).
(1c) does not strike me as marked. But unlike (1a–b), (1c) does admit of paraphrases that, in a side-by-side comparison, strike me as less marked:
2. (a) You look so good in that shirt.
(b) That shirt looks so good on you.
(c) That shirt is just killing it on you.
(d) That shirt is just killing it.—where the difference between (2c) and (2d) is that in (2d), by deleting the complement on you we leave no doubt that it is the shirt that is being treated as the agent.
Something is being attributed to the shirt in (1c) that is not being attributed to the rain or the fire in (1a–b)—but what? One common proposal would be animacy. But there is nothing in (1c) that obliges us to construe the shirt as animate, if by animate we mean tending toward goal-directed movement (or: characterized by a habit that includes a susceptibility to dizziness). Another possibility is intentionality, which we could think of as a capacity for goal-directedness absent the locomotor tendency implicated in animacy. This is trickier. Certainly the tropisms of plants (orientation with respect to gravity, light, the pressure of a rod as in the nutational thigmotropism of vining plants) represent expressions of a kind of intentionality, one that unfolds in a developmental rather than a locomotor channel. But this does not seem to get at what is being attributed to the shirt.
To my ear, what (1c) entails is that the shirt has a capacity to experience the world from a particular orientation in space and time. That is, (1c) entails that the shirt has a view from the inside: there is something is like to be that shirt.