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Part of
Beyond Emotions in Language: Psychological verbs at the interfaces
Edited by Bożena Rozwadowska and Anna Bondaruk
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 263] 2020
► pp. 1–22

Chapter 1
Psych verbs

Setting the scene

| University of Wrocław
| University of Wrocław
| John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin

The main reason why this book is important for current linguistic debates is the fact that the puzzle of psychological verbs, dating back to the seminal paper by Belletti and Rizzi (1988) (henceforth B&R) is far from being settled. Recently it has been gaining even more attention, with research on typologically different languages bringing new empirical data and new insights (e.g., Marín & McNally, 2011; Alexiadou & Iordăchioaia, 2014; Fábregas & Marín, 2015, 2017; Fábregas et al., 2017; Temme & Verhoeven, 2016; García-Pardo, 2018; Hirsch, 2018). There is a whole variety of approaches to the “psych phenomenon” or “psych properties” (see Landau, 2010 for a list of the puzzling psych properties attested cross-linguistically), each looking at the problem from a different angle, depending on the language and the specific puzzle. The purpose of the present book is to focus on issues that were not central to the previous debate or which still remain very controversial. The collection of chapters in this volume focuses on Polish and Spanish psychological verbs, two typologically different languages, in comparison with English, which bring to light new overt contrasts that remain covert in other languages (e.g., overt aspectual distinctions, the peculiarities of dative structures, including the constructivist account of some stative Experiencer eventualities, the role of information structure in word-order phenomena with psych verbs). This makes it possible to discover new relations at the interfaces of language subsystems.

Article outline
  • 1.The state of the art in synchronic studies
  • 2.Psych verbs from diachronic perspective
    • 2.1Case selection in English psych verbs from diachronic perspective
    • 2.2Impersonal/personal shift in English
    • 2.3OE/SE shift
    • 2.4The rise of the progressive with psych verbs
    • 2.5Causativity and inchoativity of psych verbs
  • 3.An overview of the chapters
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 December 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.263.01roz
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