Deriving individual-level and stage-level psych verbs in Spanish

Abstract

Aspectual notions, although displayed most clearly in verbs, manifest across categories, with notions like (un)boundedness manifesting themselves in several instantiations which are sometimes specific of individual grammatical categories. This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on how aspectual notions emerge in different categorial domains by an analysis of subject-experiencer and object-experiencer psychological predicates (SEPVs and OEPVs, respectively). We review the evidence that SEPVs denote individual level (IL) states, and provide new facts -taken from the behaviour of participles -in favour of that diagnostic; we also argue that OEPVs should be classified as states of the stage level (SL) class. We argue that OEPVs denote states with an onset, which corresponds to the denotation of SLs. SEPVs simply denote states without boundaries, which we argue to correspond to IL predicates. Finally, we show how these two denotations follow without further assumptions from the structures proposed for SEPVs and OEPVs in previous work, specially Pesetsky (1995), making it unnecessary to postulate that the distinction is of lexical nature.

Processing unambiguous verbal passives in German

“…For consistency and comparability with the English experiment, we used almost exclusively subject experiencer predicates. There is broad consensus in the literature that these predicates are clearly stative (see, e.g., Landau 2010, Fábregas & Marín 2015 and literature cited therein). Additionally, we used standard stativity tests for German (see Maienborn 2003Maienborn , 2005, such as anaphoric reference with geschehen 'happen', incompatibility with adverbs of intent, incompatibility with locative modifiers, incompatibility with in-adverbials/compatibility with foradverbials, etc.…”

Co-occurrence Strength and Transitivity Effects on Spanish Clitic Case Variation With Reverse-Psychological Predicates

“…Recall that the class of verbs that allows the alternation is just a subclass of the r-psych-verbs in Spanish. The other class of psych-verbs that does not follow the usual nominative-accusative marking only allows dative marking of the experiencer such as gustar “to like, ” encantar “to love” and faltar “to lack.” Although this class of predicates is fewer in type ( Vázquez Rosas, 2006 ; Fábregas and Marín, 2015 ), their token frequency is very high and can therefore exert an influence on the other less frequent predicates that allow for both cases of the clitic ( Bybee and Thompson, 1997 ; Bybee, 2003 , 2007 ). As a way of example, the three predicates mentioned above ( gustar “to like, ” encantar “to love” and faltar “to lack”) have an average frequency of 261.58 per-million words in the corpus.…”

Psychological verbs and their arguments

“…First, SEVs have been claimed to behave like individual-level (from now on ilevel) predicates (Fábregas & Marín 2015). I-level predicates (as opposed to stagelevel predicates, Carlson 1977) are identified, at least roughly, with permanent or near-permanent properties of the subject (either an external or an internal argument).…”

“…The external argument is the Experiencer, which has to be animate, and the internal argument corresponds to the Target / Subject-Matter-of-Emotion (Pesetsky 1995), which can be either animate or inanimate. The two arguments are related by means of a mental state, expressed by the psychological predicate (Fábregas and Marín 2015). In this section we are going to focus on the possible interpretations associated with the two arguments of SEVs and compare them to arguments of non-SEVs in English, Russian and some Romance languages.…”