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Beyond Emotions in Language: Psychological verbs at the interfaces
Edited by Bożena Rozwadowska and Anna Bondaruk
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 263] 2020
► pp. 23–74

Chapter 2
Polish psych verbs as non-achievements

| University of Wrocław

In this chapter it is argued, on the basis of the evidence from Polish, that the traditional Vendlerian classification of verbs is insufficient to accommodate Polish psych verbs. It is demonstrated that Polish perfective psych verbs are initial boundary events, different from final boundary events, such as change of state events or achievements. The analysis of temporal entailments in the domain of Polish Subject Experiencer (SE) verbs and Object Experiencer (OE) verbs supports the claim that perfectivity overtly marks the left boundary (beginning) of the state in Polish. Consequently, there is no culmination or result phrase in the denotation of either SE or OE verbs. This correlates with their behavioral syntactic properties such as passivization. The paper provides further support for the importance of inceptive/initial events different from telic right-boundary events. An attempt is made to accommodate the observations made in this chapter in the framework developed in Ramchand (2004 and subsequent work).

Keywords: achievements, change of state, event structure, experiencer verbs, first phase syntax, inceptive events, inchoative states, perfectivity, psych verbs, result states
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Final end-point oriented accounts of psych verbs
  • 3.Initial events
    • 3.1Terminology
    • 3.2Initial points in Skwxwu7mesh: Bar-el (2005)
    • 3.3 Marín and McNally’s (2011) initial point approach to psych verbs
  • 4. Polish Psych verbs vs. achievements
  • 5.Passivization of psych verbs in Polish
  • 6.Analysis
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 December 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.263.02roz
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Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Biały, Adam
2020. Chapter 3. Encoding inception in the domain of psych verbs in Polish. In Beyond Emotions in Language [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 263], ► pp. 75 ff. DOI logo
Willim, Ewa
2020. On Scalarity in the Verbal Domain. The Case of Polish Psych Verbs. Part 1: Polish Perfective Psych Verbs and Their Prefixes. Studies in Polish Linguistics 15:4 ► pp. 221 ff. DOI logo
Willim, Ewa
2021. On Scalarity in the Verbal Domain. The Case of Polish Psych Verbs. Part 2: The Aspectual Classes of Polish Psych Verbs, Perfectivity, and Scales. Studies in Polish Linguistics 16:1 ► pp. 41 ff. DOI logo

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