Chapter 3 - Psychological Verbs and Multiple Subject Constructions

Summary

Introduction

This chapter aims to provide a foundation for an understanding of the psychological constructions in Persian that will be introduced in chapter 4. The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, I discuss the psychological predicates and provide a summary of the recent analyses for them, taking into account their complicated case marking and agreement patterns. Second, I explore several distinct constructions cross-linguistically in which the subject properties are split between more than one element. That is, such constructions involve multiple subjects and exhibit complications with respect to case marking, verbal agreement, and scope interpretations. Accordingly, I introduce recent trends and proposals in approaching the spectrum of subjecthood. The basic intuition developed in this chapter is viewing subjecthood from a broader perspective, namely by introducing new elements in the clause that may satisfy some but not all of subject properties. The discussion will include “Double Subject Constructions”, “Broad Subject Constructions”, and “Applied Arguments”.

Psychological Predicates

Psychological verbs are predications of physiological/psychological/mental states, events, or feelings. They include verbs of perception, cognition, possession, existing and lacking, verbs with the modal meanings of wanting, obligation, trying, etc. The psychological predicates take an experiencer and a theme as their arguments. The highest role assigned in the psychological predicates, the experiencer, is lower than the agent/causer in the standard scale of thematic role; it therefore triggers complications with respect to its subjecthood properties, including case marking and verbal agreement. An example is in (103).

(103) Siita-ko raam pasand hai

Siita-Dat. raam-Nom. liking is

Sita likes Raam

(Verma and Mohanan, 1990:2)

Example (103) contains a dative experiencer Siita in the subject position, and the theme object raam appears in the nominative form.

Numerous cross-linguistic studies have tried to explore the psychological predicates and their complicated patterns of verbal agreement and case marking. Among them Belletti & Rizzi (B&R) (1988) is the first comprehensive study with the main focus on Italian. B&R provide the classification in (104) for the syntactic configuration of psychological verbs.

(104) Belleti & Rizzi's Classification of Psychological verbs

• a. Class I: Nominative experiencer, accusative theme. John loves Mary.

• b. Class II: Nominative theme, accusative experiencer The show amused Bill.

• c. Class III: Nominative theme, dative experiencer The idea appealed to Julie.