Psychological Verbs and Psychological Adjectives

Abstract

Abstract Psychological verbs and psychological adjectives (often referred to as psych predicates ) describe emotions and mental states. They can also be defined as predicates that take Experiencer as one of their arguments. Cross‐linguistically, psych predicates systematically exhibit peculiar properties. Psychological verbs are subdivided into three major subclasses: Subject Experiencer (SE) verbs, Object Experiencer (OE) verbs, and Dative Experiencer (DE) verbs. Their argument structure is problematic for linking problems in view of UTAH (Uniformity of Theta Assignment Hypothesis) or similar mapping generalizations. Apart from that, in various languages psychological verbs exhibit clusters of characteristic syntactic properties that clearly set them apart from prototypical transitive agentive predicates. Importantly, psychological verbs are multiply ambiguous between stative, eventive (causative), and agentive readings. The peculiar psych properties obtain only on the stative and, arguably, eventive (causative) readings. On the agentive reading, they behave like transitive action verbs. To account for the “psych phenomenon,” various approaches appeared in the literature, especially with regard to OE verbs, since it is this subclass where the psych behavior is particularly conspicuous. The early classic syntactic approach attributes the properties of both psychological OE verbs and psychological adjectives to unaccusative syntax. In contrast, on the locative approach, their syntactic properties are attributed to Experiencers viewed as locations. Alternatively, a variety of lexical thematic accounts relate their properties to thematic role types (or clusters of thematic features), postulate thematic hierarchies to capture mapping generalizations, and formulate various thematic restrictions to account for the (in)compatibility of psych verbs and psych adjectives with various syntactic constructions. Recent event‐structure approaches, in turn, explain the polysemy and variable behavior of psych predicates to differences in event types and event participants rather than specific roles. Research on nominalizations provides important evidence for the nature of the psych phenomenon.