(University of Calgary, 2001-05) Borik, Olga; Brandt, Patrick
So-called 'Psychological Predicates' have prov.en particularly problematic for a
mapping from lexical argument structure to positions in syntactic structure if one
adopts the view that: (I) this mapping should be uniform. (II) the inventory of 'thematic roles' should be kept to a minimum. Drawing heavily on data from German,
it is argued, here, that the experiencer role in truly unaccusative structures may well correspond to a locative (source or goal) role. Therefore, the verbs of this class have a truly different thematic structure from the other experiencer verbs, thus avoiding problems with the uniformity of linking from the beginning.