Psych verbs in English and Mandarin

Abstract

Psych verb constructions show peculiar properties. They appear to project the same θ-relations into inverse configurations (John fears sharks/Sharks frighten John). Furthermore, Experiencer Object psych verb constructions admit backward binding in apparent violation of familiar c-command conditions (Pictures of himself anger John). We offer a solution to both puzzles drawing crucially on data from English and Mandarin. We argue that apparent θ-role inversion is an illusion, and that Experiencer Subject psych verb constructions like John fears sharks are not in fact simple transitive constructions but instead involve a concealed clause with a silent predicate (John fears [CP sharks PRED]). Regarding backward binding, we argue for an updated version of Belletti and Rizzi's (1988) analysis of Experiencer Object psych verbs in which the putative Theme is a Source that is underlyingly c-commanded by the Experiencer.Keywords psych verbs · intensionality · concealed complement clauses · applicatives· English · Mandarin 1 Introduction: The problem of psych constructionsPsych constructions pose a number of challenges to syntactic theory. As shown in (1)- (2), Experiencer Subject (ES) and Experiencer Object (EO) psych verbs in English appear to assign the same θ-roles of Experiencer and Theme. 1 But the structural positions of the corresponding arguments are reversed or "flipped" in the two constructions (Lakoff 1970;Postal 1974). This apparent "θ-role inversion" challenges the Universal Alignment Hypothesis (UAH) of Perlmutter and Postal (1984) and the corresponding Uniformity of Theta Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH) of Baker (1988), which require identical thematic relationships to be realized in identical structural configurations. The exact identity of the non-experiencer θ-role in (1) and (2) is controversial; we label it here as THEME mainly for convience. The important point is that the same pair of roles appears to be involved in the two exemples; we return to a more careful discussion of this issue below. 2 In this study we concentrate on what Landau (2010) terms "Class I" psych verbs like fear and "Class II" psych verbs like frighten, largely putting aside discussion of his "Class III" psych verbs like appeal; the latter resemble the Class II type, but exhibit a dative preposition (to) on the experiencer (or, in other languages, dative case marking) as opposed to a simple accusative object (i): THEME EXPERIENCERThe idea appealed to Julie. (Landau 2010: 6) This is the Pre-Published Version.

‘Make’ causatives in English and Mandarin

“…Whether Experiencer Object psych verbs are derivationally related to psychological make causatives is a question we leave open for future study. For previous analyses of Experiencer Object psych verbs, see Pesetsky (1987Pesetsky ( , 1995, Belletti and Rizzi (1988), Landau (2010), and Cheung and Larson (2015). 2 We follow our earlier proposal (Cheung and Larson 2015) that the CP and DP subjects bear a source role, understood in 8b-d as a cause.…”

“…4 (10) a. [ CP 中國申奧成功]使他非常振奮。 (Zhan et al 詹衛東等 2003) zhōngguó__shēn (Cheung and Larson 2015).) In other words, the ill-formedness of (14) should not be attributed to the prohibition against the Mandarin counterpart of English expletive it.…”

Backward binding as a psych effect: A binding illusion?

“…For the agentive verb type, we chose canonical transitive verbs with agent subjects (see Appendix A and B). We refrained from using transitive verbs with causer subjects, as BB effects may be influenced by the causative feature (Cheung and Larson 2015).…”

“…Whereas EO-related BB has been argued to exist in English, Italian (Belletti and Rizzi 1988), Hungarian (È. Kiss 2002;Rákosi 2006;Rákosi 2015), and Chinese (Cheung and Larson 2015), V2 languages such as German, Icelandic, Swedish and Norwegian are claimed to be restricted with respect to exceptional binding in the psych-domain (Ottósson 1991;Broccias 1997;Platzack 2009;Kiss 2012). Following Ottósson (1991 and Platzack (2009), the basic syntactic configuration (VP-vs. CP-syntax) prevents BB in these languages.…”

Passivisation of Polish Object Experiencer verbs vs. the unaccusativity hypothesis (Part 1)

“…One piece of evidence to support this claim comes from the fact, noted by Reinhart (2001), and Chi-Han Cheung and Larson (2015), that OE verbs in English can surface with an expletive subject, when they co-occur with a clausal argument, as in (27) The possibility of having an expletive subject in (27) serves as evidence for the non-thematic status of the subject of OE verbs, as originally postulated by Belletti and Rizzi (1988).…”