Agentivity and non-culminating causation in the psych domain: Cross-linguistic evidence from Spanish and Korean

Abstract

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.