Beyond emotions in language: Psychological verbs at the interfaces ed. by Bożena Rozwadowska and Anna Bondaruk (review)

The book Beyond Emotions in Language: Psychological Verbs at the Interfaces offers formal semantic and syntactic analyses of two related issues: psychological verbs and various types of datives. The two issues are semantically related, because while not all psych verbs require the Experiencer to appear in the dative case, it is argued that some datives appearing with verbs that would not be considered psychological on lexical grounds introduce an affected participant that would experience some psychological or mental state as the result of the event. The two languages studied in detail are Spanish and Polish, against a vast background of data from typologically diverse languages and against a comprehensively presented body of research into psych verbs, datives, and related issues. Chapters 2 through 4 focus on the event structure of psych verbs, and Chapters 5 through 7 focus on datives.

Chapter 1, “Psych verbs: Setting the scene”, serves as an informal introduction to the entire volume. That is why when reporting on its contents I will also be referring to subsequent chapters. Bożena Rozwadowska, Arkadiusz Nowak, and Anna Bondaruk, the chapter’s authors, offer an overview of psych-verbs studies done within the generative paradigm. First of all, they present a typology of psych verbs. These include (a) Subject Experiencer verbs (SE), (b) Object Experiencer verbs (OE), and (c) Dative Experiencer verbs. Each subtype is illustrated by an Italian example: temere ‘to fear’ for SE verbs, preoccupare ‘to worry’ for OE verbs, and piacere ‘to please’ for DE verbs. According to the literature cited by the authors, SE verbs are stative transitive, DE are stative but unaccusative, while OE verbs are ambiguous between stative, eventive, and agentive. The issue is addressed in more detail in subsequent chapters. It should be noted, however, that the formal typology of psych verbs according to the surface syntactic function of the Experiencer is not straightforward. Thus in Chapter 5, “The syntax of accusative and dative Experiencer verbs in Polish”, Anna Bondaruk presents both accusative and dative Experiencer verbs as belonging to Object Experiencer verbs, further divided into subclasses according to Belletti and Rizzi’s (1988) typology. According to Bondaruk, verbs that have the Experiencer marked for the accusative case belong to class II, while verbs that have the Experiencer marked for the dative case belong to class III.

In Chapter 1 the authors then go on to present two accounts of what they call “the psych phenomenon”: a purely syntactic one and a semantic one. Within the first type of account, following Belleti and Rizzi (1988), phenomena observable in psych verbs are syntactically derived. Thus verbs in the temere class select the Experiencer as the external θ-role and assign structural case to the internal argument. Verbs belonging to the preoccupare and piacere classes assign no external θ-role; the Experiencer is linked to inherent case (dative or accusative respectively), and the Theme, which has no assigned case in its original position, has to move to subject position to get its structural case assigned there. Yet another purely syntactic account is that of Landau (2010), where he reduces the syntactic properties of psych verbs to those of locative structures, with Experiencers reanalyzed as mental locations.

The second major type of account, more semantically oriented, focuses on the event structure of psych-verbs and proposes a more fine-grained distinction within their thematic features. One of the claims is that the subject of OE verbs differs from the object of SE verbs: the former is the Causer or Cause, while the latter is either Target of Emotion or Subject Matter of Emotion. Further analyses focus on the eventive structure of psych verbs. It should be noted that both types of accounts seem well represented in the book. In the first three of the following chapters (2–4) the semantic account prevails, while the subsequent three (5...