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.

Abstract

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to describe the realization of the direct internal arguments of nouns in Catalan. It is based on the idea that some nouns, like verbs, are predicates, i.e., they express events and allow argument selection as well as theta-role assignment. It focuses on the direct internal arguments that are usually themes or patients and are frequently spelled-out as PPde. Nonetheless, data extracted from the analysis of 105 «transitive» nouns at CTILC show that PPde is not the only possible realization of these complements. Catalan allows direct internal arguments of nouns to be PPa, contra, vers, envers or cap a, as well as relational adjectives. Why does this variation exist? Is it systematic? Are there any factors that can explain it? This paper tries to shed some light on the diversity of realizations for direct internal arguments in Catalan. It shows that prepositional variation depends on Aspect, on nouns’ argument valence and especially on the thematic properties of the arguments themselves. Key words: syntax, Catalan, Noun Phrase, argument structure, genitive, dative.