A recalcitrant nature of object experiencers

Abstract

Object experiencers have been the object of study for many years now. The extensive analysis by Beletti and Rizzi (1988) proposed to treat those verbs as unaccusative. This approach was later revisited by Pesetsky (1995), who provided arguments against the wholesale unaccusative treatment of object experiencer verbs, introducing a finer-grained semantic division among them. Recently, Landau (2010) has come up with an analysis which at first blush reconciles the two earlier treatments. The crucial part of the analysis concerns the status of verbal passives. Following a thorough cross-linguistic study, Landau concludes that languages fall into two types with regard to the presence of verbal passives, the first type exemplified by languages such as English, Finnish or Dutch, which possess verbal passives for eventive verbs only; the second type represented by Italian, French or Hebrew, which have no verbal passives at all. However, this neat typology seems to run into problems in Polish. It appears that Polish, which shares some properties of each of the two groups, falls out of the proposed classification. This paper briefly reviews the previous treatments of experiencer verbs and highlights the areas where Polish stands out, putting forth possible ways to refine the existent analyses.