Abstract

Abstract: The experiencer’s semantic features, a lively entity conceivable as a proto-agent, allow its syntactic and semantic primacy in most of sentences with Catalan psychological verbs, and explain the flexibility of these predicates to adapt to conceptual schemes of speakers. The experiencer only loses this primacy when it has to «compete» with a prototypical agent in the sentence, an agentive construction consistent with an experiencer with accusative case. The mechanisms of semantic and syntactic pre-eminence in a sentence give reason for the regularly dative case of the Catalans verbs interessar ‘to interest’ and agradar ‘to like’, as well as for the specific contexts in which these verbs can occur in accusative, although in a more enforced way with verb agradar.Key words: accusative, agent, Catalan, dative, experiencer, patient, proto-agent, psychological verb, stimulus, to interest, to like.