Aspects of the syntax of psychological verbs in Spanish: A lexical functional analysis

In Spanish, people generally distinguish three kinds of psychological verbs, those that are syntactically realized like 'temer', like 'preocupar' and like 'gustar'. One of the peculiarities of these verbs is that, despite their semantic relatedness, each type of verbs shows up a different correspondence pattern between thematic roles and grammatical functions. In this paper I develop a unified account of these empirical data, based on Lexical Mapping Theory. As the difference between 'preocupar' and the other kinds of verbs seems to be mainly semantic, and more specifically aspectual, I propose to reformulate the thematic theory of Dowty (1991), in order to accommodate aspectual differences; more specifically, the proto-role linking of arguments is made dependent in part on the aspectual decomposition of the event denoted by a verb. In order to explain the syntactic differences between 'temer' and 'gustar', I propose to modify the mapping theory, by introducing an optional rule operating on the thematic structure of the 'gustar' verbs. These modifications give as an additional result a more consistent analysis of Spanish (and generally Romance) indirect objects and a preliminary analysis of the Spanish 'leísmo' (through which an object, traditionally analyzed as a direct object, can be marked with dative morphology) as it operates in the case of the psychological verbs.