The psych-verbs of Brazilian Portuguese and Belletti & Rizzi's unaccusative analysis; indications for a Semantic Proposaç

Abstract

Psychological verbs differ from Agent-Patient verbs in two know ways. The first classical problem raised by these verbs is that those verbs have an Experiencer and Theme that can be projected onto different sybtactic configurations, apparently, in a arbitrary way: in the first class, the fear class. the subject of the verb is the Experiencer and the Theme is the object of the verb; the second class, the frighten class, these relationships are reserved. the second issue raised by psych-verbs is that an anaphor inside the subject of a verb that has as first argument a Theme can take the object of the ver as its antecedent. The aim of this paper is to provide evidence for a semantic proposal concerning those problems of psychological verbs. Building on it, I will also propose a new classification for these verbs, by applying Belletti & Rizzi's unaccusative proposal to psychological verbs in Brazilian Portuguese.