A protocol for psych verbs
So-called psychological verbs such as Italian temere ‘fear’, preoccupare ‘worry’, and piacere ‘like’ present an extremely varied argument structure across languages, that arranges these two roles in apparently opposite hierarchies and assigns them different grammatical functions (subject, direct, in...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti
2016-11-01
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| Series: | Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://bwpl.unibuc.ro/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/5.-BWPL_2016_2_Giusti_Iovino.pdf |
| Summary: | So-called psychological verbs such as Italian temere ‘fear’, preoccupare ‘worry’, and piacere ‘like’ present an extremely varied argument structure across languages, that arranges these two roles in apparently opposite hierarchies and assigns them different grammatical functions (subject, direct, indirect and prepositional objects). This paper wants to provide a descriptively adequate classification of such verbs in Latin and Italian to serve future analyses irrespective of their theoretical persuasion. We individuate six classes in Italian and seven classes in Latin, which comply with Belletti and Rizzi’s (1988) original analysis of psych verbs and focus on the three less studied classes, namely unaccusatives, unergatives and impersonals. We show that diachronic variation and apparent intra-language idiosyncrasies are due to the fact that these classes are universally available to all psych roots. The presentation is set in a protocol fashion in the sense of Giusti and Zegrean (2015) and Di Caro and Giusti (2015). |
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| ISSN: | 2069-9239 2069-9239 |