Rethinking Italian psychological verbs

In the literature, psych-verbs are known to exhibit some peculiar properties with respect to the theta-assignment, in that their Experiencers can be realized either a subjects (Subj-Exp verbs) or objects (Obj-Exp verbs) (Pesetsky 1995, Arad 1998), contrary to what predicted by the UTAH (Baker 1988). Traditionally, Subj-Exp verbs have been analysed as transitive, while Obj-Exp verbs as unaccusative (Belletti&Rizzi 1988). In the present work, new empirical data contrasting this hypothesis will be presented and an alternative account for their special behaviour with respect to different diagnostics will be proposed. In particular, the claim will be made that the interplay between the semantics and the syntax of psych-verbs plays a crucial role in their derivation and that the linear differences between different classes of psych-verbs are the superficial manifestation of different syntactic derivations. More specifically, it will be shown that the Subj-Exp vs. Obj-Exp distinction is related the absence vs. presence, respectively, of a causative zero-morpheme.