Agentivity and stativity in experiencer verbs: Implications for a typology of verb classes
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Elisabeth Verhoeven
Abstract
Experiencer-object verbs are known to deviate from the prototype of transitive verbs. Previous studies have shown that a subset of these verbs is stative and non-agentive and argue that this semantic peculiarity accounts for particular non-canonical syntactic properties. This article shows that the stativity/non-agentivity of experiencer verbs is subject to typological variation. The empirical evidence comes from an experimental study on speaker's intuitions, which shows that some experiencer-object verbs in German and Modern Greek differ from canonical transitive verbs in agentivity and stativity, while experiencer-object verbs in Turkish, Yucatec Maya, and Chinese display the semanto-syntactic properties of canonical transitive verbs.
©Walter de Gruyter
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- The change from labial to palatal as glide hardening
- Agentivity and stativity in experiencer verbs: Implications for a typology of verb classes
- Dealing with diversity: Towards an explanation of NP-internal word order frequencies
- Syllable structure: The limits of variation, by San Duanmu
- From polysemy to semantic change, edited by Martine Vanhove
- Cyclical change, edited by Elly van Gelderen
- Bilingualism and the Latin language, by James N. Adams
Artikel in diesem Heft
- The change from labial to palatal as glide hardening
- Agentivity and stativity in experiencer verbs: Implications for a typology of verb classes
- Dealing with diversity: Towards an explanation of NP-internal word order frequencies
- Syllable structure: The limits of variation, by San Duanmu
- From polysemy to semantic change, edited by Martine Vanhove
- Cyclical change, edited by Elly van Gelderen
- Bilingualism and the Latin language, by James N. Adams