Psychological verbs and their arguments

Abstract

In this paper it is argued that objects of subject experiencer psychological verbs do not have kind reference, but rather refer to individual object entities: specific individuals, generic plurals, and even entity correlates of a property. We argue that objects of transitive subject experiencer psychological verbs must refer to atoms or sums of atoms, because they presuppose the existence of the Target-of-Emotion. Focusing mainly on data from various Romance languages and Russian, we also argue that the Target-of-emotion of psychological verbs such as odiar ‘hate’ cannot refer to a kind entity, conceived as an abstract individual or an abstract sortal concept, but instead can refer to a maximal sum of individual entities, instantiated through a generic plural.

Keywords

• transitive subject experiencer psychological verbs
• individual object entities
• Catalan
• Spanish
• English
• Russian