The constraint on bare noun phrases in Catalan psychological verbs

Abstract

In Catalan, most verbs accept noun phrases that are bare or have no determiner in the post-verbal position. However, sentences with emotional psychological verbs do not usually accept them (*Odio pastanagues ‘I hate carrots’; *Sorprenc nens ‘I surprise children’; *M’agraden trens ‘I like trains’). Without specifically referring to psychological verbs, syntactic approaches have explained this constraint as resulting from the structural position of the phrase as a specifier of a functional head. In this paper, I propose that in the case of psychological verbs it is also an informative and a semantic constraint. From the standpoint of the informative structure, the difficulty of bare noun phrases acting as a topic explains this constraint, as sentences with these predicates can barely accept phrases with nonspecific references acting as a focus: they are topic phrases even though they occupy the post-verbal position. From the semantic standpoint, the constraint can be explained by the semantic conditions that these predicates impose on the non-unspecificity of the post-verbal argument in sentences with a certain degree of non-unspecificity in the psychological experience that affects the experiencer. The constraint can be relaxed insofar as the predication denoted by the psychological verb becomes more external in certain contexts, without affecting an experiencer (*La Tona adorava nens ‘Tona adored children’ vs. Els romans adoraven estàtues ‘Romans adored statues’); on the other hand, a non-psychological verb that takes on psychological semantics affecting an experiencer via a metaphorical extension of meaning can acquire the constraint (El franctirador va ferir vianants ‘The sniper wounded pedestrians’ vs. *El professor va ferir alumnes ‘The teacher hurt students’ [ferir ‘hurt, offend’]).

Key Words: Catalan, unspecificity, informative structure, constraint, bare noun phrase, psychological verb