An RRG Approach to Pronominal Constructions of Object-Experiencer Verbs – Anticausatives or Antipassives?
Abstract
In a large number of studies, pronominal constructions of object-experiencer verbs in Romance languages are classified as anticausatives. However, this analysis is not convincing: the experiencer argument is more likely to be the most active argument than the most passive argument. According to the common criteria for determining antipassives, there is a strong argument for considering pronominal constructions of OE-verbs in Romance languages as instances of antipassives. As an alternative, we propose deriving these constructions by a lexical rule because the presumed antipassive construction in Romance languages is only productive in the semantic domain of episodic psych-verbs.
open access | peer reviewed
Submitted: March 14, 2025 | Accepted: Oct. 6, 2025 | Published April 29, 2026 | Language: en
Keywords Antipassives • Romance Languages • Object-Experiencer verbs • Role-and-Reference Grammar • Anticausatives
Copyright © 2026 Rolf Kailuweit. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-962-7/005