Abstract
The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it reports on a parallel corpus study of experiencer verbs in English and Serbian and offers a contrastive description of this class of verbs. This investigation reveals two important observations: (i) a number of Serbian equivalents of English verbs with PP complements require oblique case-marked bare NP complements, (ii) the association between P-heads of these PP complements in English and their Serbian equivalents is not random (i.e. certain Ps in English correlate with certain Ps and/or oblique cases in Serbian). Understanding the potential theoretical significance of these observations is the second goal of the paper. The non-random link between English Ps and their Serbian counterparts speaks in favor of them having a semantic contribution, which goes against Neeleman’s (1997) analysis of Ps in PP complements as having no semantic contribution due to the fact that they LF incorporate into the verb. Neeleman’s (1997) account also fails to generalize to Serbian because oblique-cased bare NP complements exhibit syntactic characteristics of arguments. It is argued that the link between oblique-cased bare NP and PP complements speaks in favor of the functional/semantic equivalence along the lines of Caha (2009, 2013).
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
