Acceptability of Different Psychological Verbal Constructions by Heritage Spanish Speakers from California

This study set out to investigate whether US Heritage Spanish features a more streamlined verbal paradigm in psych verb constructions compared to standard varieties of Spanish, where HS speakers find an invariable third-person singular form acceptable with both singular and plural grammatical subjects. In standard Spanish, the semantic subjects of psych verbs are typically pre-verbal experiencers cast as oblique arguments in inverse predicates such as in me encantan los buhos ‘I love owls’. The translation of this sentence shows that equivalent English predicates are typically direct constructions. The data were gathered using an acceptability judgement questionnaire that was distributed to participants that fit into one of three groups: early bilingual heritage speakers of Spanish from California, advanced Spanish as L2 speakers, and non-bilingual native speakers of Spanish who had learnt English as an L2 as adults. The Heritage Spanish speakers in this group often patterned differently from both other groups, who surprisingly patterned together. We argue that this is due to L2 speakers’ mode of acquisition (formal and subject to prescriptive grammar), in comparison with Heritage Spanish speakers’ naturalistic acquisition. Specifically, we find evidence for a streamlining of the Spanish verbal paradigm not immediately attributed to English interference, and that in psych verb constructions, Heritage Spanish speakers more readily accept a third-person singular invariable verbal form. This differentiation of the verbal paradigm from standard Spanish use should be considered a bona fide linguistic change, but not proof of either incomplete acquisition or language attrition. Since Heritage Spanish speakers are, after all, native speakers of Spanish, this study shows that Heritage Spanish should be considered and studied as any other dialect of Spanish, with its distinctive grammatical features, and subject to variability and change.

On Scalarity in the Verbal Domain. The Case of Polish Psych Verbs. Part 2: The Aspectual Classes of Polish Psych Verbs, Perfectivity, and Scales

Dokonane czasowniki stanów emocjonalnych sązwykle analizowane jako czasowniki wyróżniające fazępoczątkowądanego stanu. Te same predykaty mogąw pewnych kontekstach składniowych wyrażaćznaczenia ewolutywne. W artykule przedstawiona jest hipoteza, że w kontekstach inicjalnych, czasownik wyraża moment zaistnienia stanu w nosicielu. W kontekstach ewolutywnych predykat wyraża stopniowązmianęna skali intensywności stanu lub stopniowe nabycie stanu przez wszystkie części podzielnego argumentu czasownika. Zależnośćinterpretacji wewnętrznej struktury temporalnej zdarzeńod kontekstu składniowego pokazuje, wbrew tezie zawartej w pracy Rothstein (2020), że interpretacja rodzaju zdarzenia nie jest określona na poziomie czasownika dokonanego, ale ustalana jest na poziomie struktury zdaniowej (VoiceP/vP). ABSTRACT Polish perfective psych verbs are generally analyzed as inceptive predicates denoting the beginning of an emotional state holding of an experiencer. However, a perfective psych verb can also denote an event of gradual scalar change. In this paper, I argue that on the inceptive reading a perfective psych predicate denotes a transition from a state in which p does not hold to a state in which p holds of an experiencer. In events of gradual change, there is an increase in the degree on the scale of intensity of a given psych state or on the (abstract) extent scale contributed by a verb’s argument. As the internal temporal structure of the events denoted by perfective psych predicates can depend on elements of syntactic context outside the verb, the domain of aspectual composition in Polish is not the verb, pace Rothstein (2020), but VoiceP/vP.

On Scalarity in the Verbal Domain. The Case of Polish Psych Verbs. Part 1: Polish Perfective Psych Verbs and Their Prefixes

Polish perfective psych verbs are generally analyzed as inceptive predicates focusing the beginning of an emotional state holding of an experiencer. However, a perfective psych verb can also denote an event of gradual scalar change. In this paper, I argue that on the inceptive reading a perfective psych predicate denotes a transition from a state in which p does not hold to a state in which p holds of an experiencer. In events of gradual change, there is an increase in the degree on the scale of intensity of a given psych state or on the (abstract) extent scale contributed by a verb’s argument. As the internal temporal structure of the events denoted by perfective psych predicates can depend on elements of syntactic context outside the verb, the domain of aspectual composition in Polish is not the verb, pace Rothstein (2020), but VoiceP/vP.

Not all object experiencers are the same: The role of se and the argument structure of Serbian psych verbs anticausatives

The goal of this paper is to account for the observation that some Serbian object experiencer anticausatives take instrumental NPs as expressions of the causer participant whereas others take od(‘from’)- PPs. Following a number of authors (Alexiadou et al. 2013, Doron 2014, Anagnostopoulou & Samioti 2014, a. o.), I assume that differences in the licensing of expressions introducing event participants point in the direction of structural differences in terms of presence/absence of certain layers of verbal structure. The observed difference is accounted for by assuming that instrumental NPs are syntactically licensed by VoiceP while od(‘from’)-PPs are rejected by VoiceP owing to a semantic clash. Consequently, full VoiceP structure is present with psych verb anticausatives that license instrumental NPs and absent with psych verb anticauatives that license od(‘from’)-PPs. The analysis presented in the paper has implications for the syntactic and semantic status of SE as well. It is suggested that Chierchia’s (2004) reflexive approach to anticausatives can be extended to psych verb anticausatives which license instrumental NPs whereas the standard approach (Schäfer & Vivanco 2016) should be retained for typical anticausatives with inanimate internal arguments and object experiencers that license od (‘from’)-PPs. Such a “middle-ground” solution follows from the syntactic structures I propose for these two different sets of psych verb anticausatives.

Conditions on prominent internal possessors in Turkish

This chapter investigates the syntactic properties of the prominent possessor constructions in Turkish. Possessors of possessive phrases become prominent only in a set of well-defined constructions, namely, from within an adverbial clause, typically containing a body part idiom. These idioms have the structure NP-POSS V, where N is a noun of inalienable possession, V is an unaccusative verb, and the idiom itself is paraphraseable as a psych-verb. The chapter analyses the syntactic structure of these idioms and proposes that the subject position in the adverbial clause is occupied by PRO. PRO is in the c-command domain of the matrix subject and is the locus of the experiencer of the unaccusative verb. The possessor is coindexed with this experiencer via its morphosyntactic features.

Obligatory dative clitic-doubling of type III experiencers in Bulgnais

The correlation between the position of the Dative experiencer of a type III psych-verb relative to the verb itself and the obligatory vs. optional nature of an associated Dative clitic has seldom been noted in the literature, and it has never previously been explained. This paper presents relevant new data from Bulgnais (Bologna, Italy), and it proposes that these verbs, in the languages that require the Dative clitic with the preverbal Dative experiencer, have an additional strong lexical property beyond inherent Case licensing. Like Case licensing, this property requires feature checking, which is satisfied alternately by the clitic (unmarked word-order) or by the experiencer phrase. Only when the clitic checks the lexically required feature can the full experiencer move to the preverbal position, because otherwise, it is frozen in a postverbal position by its role in checking the mentioned strong lexical feature, which occurs lower in the verbal domain.

Iconicity in argument structure

A long tradition of psych-verb research in spoken languages has demonstrated that they constitute a class of their own, both semantically and syntactically. This study presents a description and analysis of psych-verbs in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) in order to investigate whether this verb type displays comparable peculiarities in sign languages. The study is primarily based on data from the Corpus NGT (Crasborn et al. 2008). Firstly, the data indicate that all psych-verbs in NGT select a subject Experiencer. Secondly, it is shown that there is an iconic property of psych-verbs in NGT that lays bare a conceptual link between psychological states and locative relations: body-anchoring. The location singled out by the place of articulation of a psych-verb is associated with the metaphoric location of an emotion, or a type of behavior associated with the expression of an emotion. It is furthermore argued that the body as a whole iconically represents the container of a psychological state. The body is analyzed as a possessive determiner that may receive a first person specification as a consequence of body-anchoring. The data support such an analysis, as they suggest that sentences without an overt Experiencer yield a default first person interpretation. Thus, it is claimed that iconicity affects sentence structure and as such should be incorporated into the formal grammar system. Given that body-anchoring is the source of the effects mentioned above, it may be hypothesized that psych-verbs in NGT do not constitute a class of its own, but rather belong to a larger class of iconically motivated body-anchored verbs that share the properties mentioned above.