Case Marking and the Semantics of Mental Verbs

Abstract

Given the decomposition of a situation or state of affairs into a predicate and one or more arguments, there is surprisingly little cross-linguistic variation as to which argument is assigned to subject position of the simple active voice form of the predicate.2 The vast majority of predicates assign the same argument to subject position in all languages, whether ‘subject’ is manifested as nominative or ergative (transitive subject) case, by word order, or by verb agreement. This is true despite the fact that in terms of thematic role, the arguments assigned to subject position are quite a varied lot. This poses a challenge to any semantically-based theory of subject assignment that attempts to avoid simple stipulation of which argument is assigned to subject position. This paper will illustrate a semantic model of verb meaning that answers this challenge, by examining cross-linguistically the assignment to subject position of a class of predicates that do vary in subject assignment across languages, mental verbs.