The locative syntax of experiencers (review)

The book offers a thorough and comprehensive analysis of psych-verb constructions. While its intended readership is professional syntacticians, the monograph could be used successfully as part of any advanced course in syntax in which the focus is not only on the specific topic covered by the monograph, but more generally on how to construct a sound argument in linguistics. One of the many strengths of this work is the formulation of a few compelling abstract principles that admirably account for the many intricate grammatical facts explored in the book.

Landau presents his argument in a top-down fashion. The two main theses are immediately presented: firstly, Experiencers are mental locations—that is, locatives. As such, secondly, they undergo “locative inversion” (p. 6). The rest of the book is devoted to reconstructing the argument leading to these two main conclusions and to illustrating a number of very important ancillary conclusions that ultimately follow from the interaction of independent grammatical principles and the proposed structure of psych-verb sentences.

Landau’s starting point is the tripartite classification in Belletti and Rizzi (1988) (B&R henceforth). Class I verbs are subject Experiencer verbs (nom Experiencer, acc Theme). Both B&R and Landau treat these verbs as regular transitive verbs, although Landau shows that their alleged underlying locative character emerges in certain contexts (pp. 11–15). Landau’s treatment of Class III (nom Theme, dat Experiencer) is also rather similar to B&R's, modulo some important implementation differences: they are unaccusative verbs and, as a consequence, they do not project vP (see (1b)). Class II verbs (nom Theme and acc Experiencer) are treated either as transitives or unaccusatives; they can in fact project an external argument—hence they are not “double object” unaccusatives as in B&R—when they are not “unambiguously stative” (p. 55) and, crucially, what looks on the surface like an object DP is in fact a pp headed by a null Preposition (see (1)). Moreover, both Class II and Class III Experiencers are inherently case marked, a property Landau proposes to be universal (pp. 54–55).

1. 1.

   1. a. Class II (non-stative):

   2. b. Class II (stative), Class III:

Unambiguously stative Class II verbs are treated as unaccusatives projecting Experiencer and T/SM (Target/Subject Matter; see Pesetsky (1995) for discussion on T/SM). Hence under Landau’s proposal, Class II and Class III verbs are much closer than previously thought: they both feature an inherently case-marked Experiencer structurally realized as a pp headed by a null P. Additionally, the structure of Class II verbs reduces to that of Class III verbs when stative.

The first six chapters of the book are devoted primarily to providing evidence favoring the analysis proposed. The structure of the argument typically consists in isolating a grammatical phenomenon that singles out object Experiencers (a “psych-effect”), followed by an account of how the structure in (1) and the case theoretic proposals above account for the particular phenomenon. For example, the islandhood of Class II Experiencer objects in Italian— as opposed to the non-islandhood of regular objects—is now elegantly accounted for: pps are independently known to be islands in the language (pp. 23–24). In Russian, the Genitive of negation rule, which shifts the case of the object from acc to gen under clausal negation, only applies to non-oblique objects. It also does not apply to Class II psych-objects. Under the present analysis, this is expected: we are in fact really dealing with oblique pp objects (p. 26). In English, object Experiencers pattern with inner objects in double object constructions, often analyzed as introduced by a null P, in resisting heavy object shift (p. 31). In Greek, objects cannot be resumed by a clitic when relativized, with the exception of Class II Experiencers that force the presence of the clitic. Interestingly, shifted dative arguments in double object constructions also require the clitic, thereby showing once again how object Experiencers behave...