Among the sources of non-culminating readings, we find the agentive properties of the external argument. According to the Agent Control Hypothesis (ACH), the agenthood of the subject licenses a non-culminating interpretation with causative accomplishment predicates, whereas non-agentive subjects generally oblige a culminating reading. Experiencer object verbs such as annoy or surprise are analyzed as having a causative reading, encoding a situation where the agent or causer brings about the state in the experiencer. Based on this similarity with causative accomplishments, this article investigates the impact of an agentive interpretation of the subject on the cancellation of the state in object experiencers in Spanish and Korean transitive psych predicates in a parallel experimental design. In accordance with the ACH, results revealed for both languages that subject animacy had a significant effect on the acceptability of a zero-state reading. Furthermore, the interaction of subject animacy with the lexical aspect of the verb yielded a significant effect in the Spanish data such that cancelling of the state in the experiencer was significantly more acceptable with psych verbs denoting inchoative state causatives than with those denoting punctual causative events. In a second acceptability study, the verbs were tested for their compatibility with an agentive interpretation of the subject. The obtained (gradient) agentivity values turned out to significantly predict the potential of each verb to have a zero-state reading for the subclasses denoting pure and inchoative state causatives, which further supports the ACH.

Languages differ with respect to the morphological structure of their verbal inventory: some languages predominantly derive intransitive experiencer-subject verbs from more basic transitive experiencer-object verbs by morphosyntactic operations such as stative passivization (e.g., German, English), reflexivization (e.g., German, Spanish), or mediopassive voice (e.g., Greek, Icelandic). Other languages apply transitivizing operations of causativization to intransitive basic forms, e.g., via causative affixes (e.g., Turkish, Japanese, Yucatec Maya) or embedding under causative predicates (e.g., Korean, Chinese). Yet other languages derive both alternants from a common base (e.g., Hungarian, Cabécar). This classification is especially pertinent when applied to psych verbs, given that variable linking is a widely recognized characteristic of this domain. The valence orientation profile of a language’s psych domain has recently been linked to the presence or absence of noncanonical syntax, another well-known property of psych predicates. This article reports results from an ongoing study which aims to test this observation on a larger typological scale, presenting comparative empirical data on the interplay of morphology and syntax in the psych domains of Icelandic, Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Yucatec Maya, Finnish, Turkish, and Bété.

Languages display global preferences for transitive, intransitive or underspecified roots in their verbal lexicon and correspondingly for the use of processes for deriving related concepts with different valency (cf. Nichols, Johanna, David A. Peterson & Jonathan Barnes. 2004. Transitivizing and detransitivizing languages. Linguistic Typology 8. 149–211). This classification is particularly relevant when applied to psych verbs, since variable linking is a widely recognized feature of this domain. This paper reports on the results of a larger typological study, involving 26 languages from 15 language families, aimed at investigating directionality in the psych alternation. In our data, most languages show preferences for one of the alternation strategies (augmented, reduced, undirected) which is then pervasive in their psych inventory, while the alternative patterns are marginally represented. Furthermore, the Indo-European languages of Europe stand out in being detransitivizing in the psych domain whereas transitivizing and underspecified languages do not show areal patterns. Moreover, we found a significant impact of alignment type on the occurrence of alternation strategies to the effect that reducing strategies are significantly less frequent in languages with ergative traits compared to languages without ergative traits. Our data also showed a positive effect of alignment in the undirected strategies meaning that undirected pairs are significantly more frequent in languages with ergative traits.

Summary In this paper, we model the left-bounded state reading and the true reflexive reading of the se clitic in the Spanish psychological domain. We argue that a lexical analysis of se provides us with a more accurate description of the different classes of psychological verbs that occur with the clitic. We provide a unified analysis where the use of the two readings of se are modeled by means of lexical rules. We take the morphologically simple but semantically more complex basic items (e.g. asustar‘frighten’) as input of the lexical rules, getting as the output a morphologically more complex but semantically simpler verb (e.g asustarse‘get frightened’). The analysis for psych verbs correctly allows only those verbs assigning accusative to the experiencer or the stimulus to combine with se, hence preventing dative verbs from entering the lexical rules. The analysis also demonstrates how to account for punctual and non-punctual readings of psych verbs with se incorporating ‘boundaries’ into the type hierarchy of eventualities.

In this paper, we argue that by making a more detailed distinction of theta-roles, while at the same time investigating the correlation of case marking, theta-role assignment, and eventuality types, we can describe different psych-verb subclasses and explain their alignment patterns in Spanish and Korean. We propose a neo-Davidsonian treatment of psych-verbs in HPSG that allows us to account for the underspecification of theta-roles which are modeled in an inheritance hierarchy for semantic relations. By assuming linking properties modeled lexically, we can constrain the properties for psych-verbs which shows the mapping of semantic arguments (i.e. experiencer, stimulus-causer, subject matter and target) to the elements in the argument structure. The type hierarchy and lexical rules proposed here capture the alternation in case marking not only of the experiencer (as traditionally assumed in the literature), but also of the stimulus. This analysis leads us to a new fourfold classification of psych-verbs for both languages.