Abstract
In this paper it is argued that objects of subject experiencer psychological verbs do not have kind reference, but rather refer to individual object entities: specific individuals, generic plurals, and even entity correlates of a property. We argue that objects of transitive subject experiencer psychological verbs must refer to atoms or sums of atoms, because they presuppose the existence of the Target-of-Emotion. Focusing mainly on data from various Romance languages and Russian, we also argue that the Target-of-emotion of psychological verbs such as odiar ‘hate’ cannot refer to a kind entity, conceived as an abstract individual or an abstract sortal concept, but instead can refer to a maximal sum of individual entities, instantiated through a generic plural.
Highlights
The aim of this paper is to provide an answer to two main questions
We started this paper by observing that SEVs only allow object arguments that refer to particular atomic individuals with a specific reading, or to sums of individuals with either a generic or a specific reading
We have argued that the illusion of kind experiencers appears exclusively in sentences that convey Igenericity
Summary
Generic objects: some more pieces of the puzzle. Demonte (eds.), Gramática Descriptiva de la Lengua Española I. Schwarze & A. von Stechow (eds.), Meaning, Use and Interpretation of Language. A unified parametric theory of bare nouns and proper names. Representation Theory and the Theory of Generalized Quantifiers. Mapping a parochial lexicon onto a universal semantics. Definite/zero alternations in Portuguese: towards a unification of topic constructions. Tranel & M.Uribe-Etxebarria (eds.), Romance linguistics: theoretical perspectives.
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