Experiencers and goals in German unaccusatives
Date
2001-05
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Calgary
Abstract
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.
Description
Keywords
Linguistics, German language, Syntax
Citation
Borik, O., & Brandt, P. (2001). Experiencers and goals in German unaccusatives. Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics, 23(Spring), 1-13.